MINNEAPOLIS, July 24, 2008—Minnesota researchers played an important role in solving a two-month-old salmonella mystery.

For weeks the Centers for Disease Control had targeted tomatoes in the epidemic that had sickened over 1,000 people. Minnesota had no reported victims of the outbreak. And then, suddenly, in the first week of July, six Minnesotans got sick after eating in a Twin Cities restaurant which had switched to a safe brand of tomatoes. Many of the restaurant's items included a raw jalapeño garnish.

The jalapeño relish was the big break in a vexing case, according to a news story on Fox News Wednesday.

On July 3, the Minnesota Department of Health emailed the CDC about the jalapeños. Investigators had a diagram tracing the peppers all the way back to three farms in Mexico. This was a turning point, when federal investigators began to think tomatoes were not the cause of the outbreak.

One of those farms was shipping peppers to a warehouse in Texas where FDA inspectors weeks later would find a single contaminated Mexican-grown pepper.

Press accounts noted that Minnesota was able to respond accurately with only six cases of the contagion, when the federal government had struggled for weeks to establish a connection.

The CDC had no comment. The FDA suggested reviewing its procedures to see if they might be improved.

"We have got to put the appropriate perspective on this outbreak as to what went right and what went wrong so the kind of changes that are going to further foodborne disease (prevention) can be made," said Michael Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

Osterholm told Fox News that the salmonella mystery may be the "swine flu of foodborne disease," and make federal health officials more reluctant to issue consumer warnings unless they've already found the smoking gun, an actual tainted food.

Fox News story