US FDA discovered the same strain of Salmonella that killed one American this year and sickened over a thousand others at a farm in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.

At this particular Mexican farm, FDA discovered the bacteria in both a pepper grown on the farm and the irrigation water used at the farm.

Shortly before this discovery, the FDA found the same bacteria on a jalapeno pepper that was grown at a different Mexican farm in a Texas warehouse.

Montezuma's Revenge: Traveller's Diarrhea affects American travellers to Mexico that everyone is familiar with the colloquial name. Coworkers and relatives of mine have been afflicted with it before when traveling o Mexico on vacation.

This tends to explain one way that such a high amount of Salmonella infected food made it into the USA and infected so many people. If the crops were being grown with salmonella infected water in Mexico and then shipped up to the US that could explain the extraordinarily high number of Americans that got infected.

US law requires that the "country of origin" be displayed on produce imported into the USA from other countries.

However, due to lax consumer protection enforcement this has not been the case in many years.

With this latest public health incident, perhaps placing the required labels on food will allow the consumers and market forces help turn around the declining safety of food sold in the US.

Without such labeling, consumers can not make a natural shift towards safer products while a particular region works out acute or chronic issues with food safety.

In the future, maybe inspecting farms irrigation water before the fact will help protect conosumer's health and industries' revenue. In this case that could have prevented a whole nationwide epidemic in the US.

In this fragile economy, some restaurants may feel the pinch this crisis created this summer. At least one well known restaurant chain has declared bankruptcy recently. Coffee houses are closing hundreds of stores nationwide.

It is not unthinkable, especially after Chi-Chi's going out of business the last time this happened - that Mexican food restaurant chains could be hard hit again. At leaet until proactive testing/protection practices are in place to protect the public.