In 2008, over 1300 Salmonella Saintpaul illnesses were initially linked to Florida tomatoes. Turned out that Mexico-grown Serrano peppers were the culprit. 

In 2011, Egyptian fenugreek sprouts were the source of a devastating outbreak of E. coli O104:H4 with over 4000 illnesses and 50 deaths – but spanish cucumbers (and other vegetables) were fingered first.

In both cases health officials were responding to illnesses in real-time with enough information to go public and advise consumers, retailers, food service providers and distributors to do something: avoid what certainly looked like the product which was making folks sick. That’s what good public health agencies do. Better ones share all the information they have as to why they made their decisions.

Outbreak investigations are messy, there are lots of moving parts and incoming data. People don’t always remember what they ate, presumptive positives turn out to be something else (either a negative or a non-outbreak strain) and distribution information is often hard to get at. These factors slow down investigations and sometimes take them in the wrong direction.

The U.S. CDC said Friday that "joint investigation efforts indicate that cantaloupe grown in southwestern Indiana is a likely source of this outbreak."

Today, Iowa’s chief epidemiologist, Patty Quinlisk says not so fast.

From KMA Land,

[According to Quinlisk] “We link people who’ve gotten sick with the exact same bacteria, so we have six people, maybe seven, with the exact same bacteria but as far as we can tell right now, only two of them even ate cantaloupe and we don’t know where that cantaloupe came from yet.”

While health officials in Kentucky and Indiana believed they’d traced the exact cause of the outbreak to those cantaloupes, Quinlisk says that’s still a mystery. “Sometimes these bacteria are not that uncommon and there can be multiple places that people can get it from, especially with these more common strains,” Quinlisk says.

“That’s what we’re investigating. I don’t know yet quite what’s going on. Sometimes people just don’t remember eating a certain food, but sometimes it’s that they actually didn’t eat that food and they got exposed to that bacteria someplace else.”