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Salmonella Pops Up In Sprouts, Cilantro And Parsley

Enough already. Will the contamination of food we thought was healthy ever stop?

Turns out that alfalfa sprouts, practically the poster child for health foods, can make you sick. The Food and Drug Administration from of Urbana, Ill. Stay way from the company's organically grown alfalfa sprouts and its line of Spicy Sprouts, a mix that includes radish and clover sprouts.

The Tiny Greens sprouts have been "preliminarily linked," in the FDA's lingo, to a big outbreak of salmonella that has so far sickened nearly 100 people, mostly in the Midwest. See the map of cases put together by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention:

A lot of the sickening sprouts made their way into sandwiches sold by the . The FDA says the company isn't serving sandwiches with sprouts anymore in Illinois, where the majority of salmonella cases have been reported.

Sprouts have been a problem for quite a while. In May, another multistate salmonella outbreak , which recalled its products. The feds s to avoid eating uncooked sprouts, which have been involved in a string of recalls and disease outbreaks.

Separately, but also quite yuckily, a is of cilantro, parsley (the curly-leafed kind) and other produce after some tests found salmonella. The stuff is sold under the brand "Little Bear." J&D Produce, the distributor of the food, of anybody getting sick from eating the potentially contaminated food.

Earlier this year, CDC researchers reported that salsa and guacamole, which we love to load up with cilantro, are in this country.

Update:There's more info on the affected J&D products in on the FDA's website.

Copyright 2020 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Scott Hensley edits stories about health, biomedical research and pharmaceuticals for NPR's Science desk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, he has led the desk's reporting on the development of vaccines against the coronavirus.