The Californian from Salinas, California • 7

Tuesday, August 19, 2008 CALIFORNIA Mexican peppers posed problem XJ Many were rejected before salmonella outbreak l- THE ASSOCIATED PRESS FILE PH0TQ A women sells produce in front of a pile of jalapeno peppers in Mexico City in July. Only jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico are implicated in the nationwide salmonella outbreak in the U.S., the government announced in clearing the U.S. crop. By GARANCE BURKE The Associated Press FRESNO Federal inspectors at U.S. border crossings repeatedly turned back filthy, disease-ridden shipments of peppers from Mexico in the months before a salmonella outbreak that sickened 1,400 people was finally traced to Mexican chilies.

Yet no larger action was taken. Food and Drug Administration officials insisted as recently as last week that they were surprised by the outbreak because Mexican peppers had not been spotted as a problem before. But an Associated Press analysis of FDA records found that peppers and chilies were consistently the top Mexican crop rejected by border inspectors for the last year. Since January alone, 88 shipments of fresh and dried chilies were turned away. Ten percent were contaminated with salmonella.

In the last 8 percent of the 158 intercepted shipments of fresh and dried chilies had salmonella. On Friday, Dr. David Acheson, the FDA's food safety chief, told reporters peppers were not a cause for concern before they were implicated in the salmonella outbreak. "We have not typically seen problems with peppers," Acheson said. "Our import sampling is typically focused on areas where we know we've got problems or we've seen problems in the past, which is why we're now increasing our sampling for peppers." Not rejections On Monday, the FDA said Acheson's comment was in relation to outbreaks or illness associated with Mexican peppers, not the rejection of pepper shipments at the borders.

Calls to the FDA seeking elaboration were not immediately returned. Still, food-safety advocates question why the vulnerable to contamination from birds and other animals, Buchanan said. Inspectors might have looked over the odd box of fresh Mexican chilies, but no one paid raw peppers much attention since they were not mentioned as a high-risk crop, he said Not high priority "Somebody could have fucked up a box and ooked at peppers if they wanted to, but I'm not sure that would have been a high priority," Buchanan said. "It would require a big leap to think that salmonella in dried peppers could be related to problems in fresh chilies." Since the salmonella outbreak began in April, 1,423 people have fallen ill and the produce industry has lost more than $200 million as consumers have shied away from buying fresh produce. Federal investigators are now focusing their probe on fresh hot peppers from Mexico jalapenos and serranos but still suspect that tainted tomatoes were initially involved.

This month, the agency put a dozen Mexican growers or distributors on its "import alert" list for tougher border screening. On Friday, Acheson said the agency had stepped up testing of certain Mexican produce and uncovered more cases of salmonella contamination just not the same strain that caused this particular outbreak in jalapenos, basil and cilantro. In July, six separate shipments of fresh jalapenos and serranos were stopped after inspectors found they were contaminated with salmonella, FDA data One crate detained on July 29 came from Agrico-la Zaragoza, a Mexican packinghouse that handled produce from two farms where chilies linked to the outbreak were traced. "If so many of the peppers we eat in the U.S. come in from Mexico, you'd 1 think we would want to pay more attention," said Mike Doyle, director of the University of Georgia's Center for Food Safety, which works with industry to improve growing and packing practices.

"Something isn't working." agency did not pay more attention to the peppers being stopped at the border and why it took the nation's largest foodborne illness outbreak for the agency to ratchet up its screening of companies known for shipping dirty chilies. "If the fact that they were showing up on problem lists for a year doesn't make them high-risk, I don't know what does," said Ami Gadhia, policy counsel with Consumers Union, the nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports magazine. "If it's across the board, then that's a systemic problem that FDA needs to be able to nimbly respond to." The agency initially suspected that fresh tomatoes had caused the outbreak. Then officials determined in mid-July that jalapenos could also be sickening people' and eventually traced implicated pepper shipments all the way back to two farms in Mexico. The agency doesn't keep count of what percentage of the nearly 491,200 metric tons of Mexican peppers imported last year were turned away at the U.S.

border. In general, the federal government inspects less than 1 percent of all foreign food entering the country. 84 percent from Mexico According to the Department of Agriculture, 84 percent of all fresh peppers eaten in the U.S. come from Mexico. In the last year, the agency's data show that dozens of cases were turned back due to filth, illegal pesticides and in one case, something poisonous.

Bob Buchanan, a former senior science adviser at FDA, said part of the problem may be that the agency sets its priorities for the food it considers to be high-risk years in advance. Dried peppers and other imported spices were considered sufficiently risky to be mentioned on a 2006 FDA manual instructing inspectors on which high-risk foods deserved a more careful check. The agency has long considered salmonella to be a risk in dried chilies, since foreign spice traders often leave peppers to dry in the sun where they're Lawsuit targets pollution credits Groups claim LA. agency broke law By NOAKI SCHWARTZ The Associated Press LOS ANGELES A coalition of. environmental groups filed a federal lawsuit Monday against Southern California's anti-smog agency accusing it of unlawfully allowing companies to pollute by selling them invalid emission credits.

The lawsuit accuses the South Coast Air Quality Management District of selling the bogus credits "to countless polluting facilities" for nearly two decades. The credits are required by state and federal law for companies seeking to expand operations and emit more pollution. The conservationists charge that the air district's cache of emission credits was used up long ago, but that it sold companies bogus credits allotted for public service projects. The agency covers Orange County and parts of Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Riverside counties. "Why is the agency created to protect the air so actively trying to pollute it?" said Tim Grabiel, a staff attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, among the groups that filed the lawsuit.

The coalition accuses the agency of violating the federal Clean Air Act, which requires credits to be enforceable, quantifiable and permanent. fThe group wants a court to declare that the district violated the act and wants an injunction prohibiting the district from distributing invalid credits. Several calls for comment to the district were not returned Monday afternoon because the organization's media office was closed. Others groups that filed the lawsuit include the Coalition for a Safe Environment, Desert Citizens Against Pollution and Communities for a Better Environment. On July 28, the same group won a related court victory regarding how the agency developed its air credits.

A Los Angeles Superior Court judge found that local officials had not done an adequate environmental and health analysis before deciding to sell credits to energy companies for far below market value. The decision threw a wrench into plans for more than a dozen new power plants in Southern California. The credits in question were part of a special supply of pollution credits that were supposed to be used for public services such as the construction of schools or hospitals even if they add to the region's pollution. Instead, the district sold the credits to energy companies for $420 million. Angela Johnson Meszaros, an attorney for Desert Citizens Against Pollution, compared the regional agency's activities to a bank giving out counterfeit dollars.

"We say you can't give money to power plants," she said. "Then we start looking at it and start to realize the money they want to give out to the power plants is money they don't have," she said. Raids net $20M worth of marijuana Mom seeks quick trial for escape from prison i- juana plants were removed from the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto mountains, another 5,000 were taken from a canyon northwest of Lake Arrowhead, and 15,000 plants were confiscated in a drainage area west of Big Bear Lake. The seven arrested face charges of cultivating more than 1,000 marijuana plants and conspiracy to cultivate. Two of those arrested face additional firearms charges.

The U.S. Forest Service did not release the names of the suspects. Agency spokesman John Miller said they face up to 10 years in federal prison if convicted, Authorities also arrest seven people The Associated Press SAN BERNARDINO Authorities arrested seven people and seized about $20 million worth of marijuana in a series of raids on marijuana plantations in the San Bernardino National Forest, officials said Monday. The raids were conducted over the last two weeks and yielded more than 60,000 marijuana plants, the U.S. Forest Service said.

More than 40,000 mari 1 I i V. "THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Susan LeFevre, 53, right, talks Monday with her attorney, William Swor, at her preliminary examination in district court in Plymouth, Mich. The California mother of three will face trial on an escape charge more than three decades after she fled a Michigan prison. Woman was captured after 30 years By ED WHITE The Associated Press PLYMOUTH, Mich. A California woman captured more than 30 years after she escaped from a Michigan prison is "extremely uncomfortable" back behind bars and wants to move the case through the courts as quickly as possible, her attorney said Monday.

Susan LeFevre, 53, skipped her right to a preliminary examination, a waiver that sends her case to Wayne County Circuit Court weeks earlier than anticipated In 1976, with the help of her grandfather, LeFevre climbed over a barbed-wire fence at a state prison after serving a year of a 10-to 20-year sentence for selling heroin. In April, the mother of three was arrested outside her home in an affluent area of San Diego. LeFevre is back in Michigan serving at least years on the drug charge before a chance at parole. But she also faces a separate escape charge. Defense attorney William Swor said he plans to vigorously fight it, although he declined to Fire shuts down one of two nuke plant reactors Spokesman John Cordell of the Michigan Department of Corrections said LeFevre can seek a higher level of security.

"We feel she's well-managed. We haven't heard about any outward threats by other prisoners. We train our staff to treat all our prisoners equally," Cordell said Separately, Swor is trying to get LeFevre's drug sentence thrown out in Saginaw County Circuit Court. He said she never expected to get 10 years in prison when she agreed to plead guilty in 1974. LeFevre was 19 when she was arrested "It was cookie-cutter sentencing" with no regard to the details of each case, Swor said elaborate.

The next court date is Aug. 28. "Now we can move to circuit court and file our motions," Swor said. LeFevre has not been physically threatened, he said, but everyone knows her background at Scott Correctional Facility in Plymouth. "She's extremely uncomfortable.

She's been reminded she's the suburban" mom, Swor told reporters outside 35th District Court. "There are staff that are extraordinarily kind. There are staff that are singling her out for special attention. "There's nowhere she can go to be alone. There's nowhere she can go to get peace," the attorney said.

She did not know when the reactor would restart. The fire broke out Sunday at a non-nuclear part of the plant, and the power plant's own firefighting crew extinguished the blaze in about 14 minutes. The plant started supplying electricity in 1985 and generates power for about 3 million homes in Northern and Central California. The cause of the fire was being investigated. The Associated Press SAN LUIS OBISPO One of two reactors at the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant remained shut down Monday after a transformer fire was extinguished.

There was no danger of a radiation leak, and the reactor was shut down as part of standard safety procedures at the Central Coast facility, spokeswoman Sharon Gavin said..