What test will confirm illness resulting from salmonella in tainted produce?

Question

Why? Because being able to show cause and effect is useful, and that information could be used to prevent other people from getting sick.

Answer 1

The way they track contamination is twofold. First they isolate the strain of Salmonella from the infected persons. If several persons have the same strain, then the likelihood of a single contaminant source is high. Then they would interview the people to determine what they ate before becoming sick. Once they can determine that all the cases have a common food item, they can try to find a sample. For instance, in multiple cases with a single restaurant chicken entree in common, they would go there and take samples of the chicken and culture them on agar plates for Salmonella species.

Items which have a large distribution area, and little way to track, like produce, they would take samples of the suspect veggie to culture, and try and isolate it that way. A positive culture would yield further inspections as to the source of the veggies, and then the distributor and growers down the food chain, to the individual field if possible.

There is no single confirmatory test, but rather a combination of detective work with scientific analysis.

Answer 2

none.

you can tell that you got salmonella.

you can't tell where it came from.

besides, why?