Jalapeños Grown in Sinaloa Have Sickened 345 People in 27 States. Half of Them Ate at Chipotle or Qdoba.

A salmonella outbreak traced to jalapeño peppers grown in Sinaloa, Mexico has sickened at least 345 people across 27 states and sent 36 of them to the hospital, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Wednesday. No deaths have been reported.

The pathogen is Salmonella Javiana, a less common serotype than the strains behind most large American produce outbreaks. Investigators traced the peppers to Coast Citrus Distributors, which supplied restaurants including Chipotle Mexican Grill and Qdoba locations in seven states. About half of the people interviewed by health officials reported eating at one of the two chains before falling ill. Coast Citrus has agreed to recall the remaining implicated product, the Food and Drug Administration said.

The case count is heavily concentrated. Colorado and Minnesota have each reported at least 110 cases, together accounting for roughly two-thirds of the outbreak. Illinois has 30 and Kansas 13. The remaining cases are scattered across Alabama, Arkansas, California, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming.

Minnesota's cases clustered tightly, with illness onsets falling between June 24 and July 2 and an exposure window running from mid-June to mid-July. Of 84 people interviewed in that state, 75 said they had eaten at a Chipotle. That kind of clustering is what allows epidemiologists to work backward from a restaurant to a single ingredient and then to a single supplier — the peppers, not the chains, are the source. The CDC said neither Chipotle nor Qdoba "are considered a current ongoing risk to consumers in this outbreak," and both companies pulled the affected jalapeños from their restaurants.

Salmonella typically produces diarrhea, fever and abdominal cramps within eight to 72 hours of exposure. Most otherwise healthy adults recover within a week without antibiotics, but infections can be severe in young children, adults over 65 and people with weakened immune systems. The hospitalization rate in this outbreak, roughly one in 10 reported cases, is in the ordinary range for salmonella, though the true number of infections is almost certainly far higher: for every laboratory-confirmed case, the CDC estimates dozens go unreported because people recover at home without ever being tested.

Fresh peppers are a recurring weak point in the American produce supply. They are eaten raw or barely cooked, they are often diced into shared containers where one contaminated lot can seed an entire batch, and they move through a distribution chain that can put a single Mexican farm's output into hundreds of restaurant kitchens within days. This is the second multistate salmonella outbreak tied to a single supplier to be announced this summer, following one traced to Texas egg farms in July that sickened 98 people in 17 states.