U.S. inspectors head to Mexico's onion exporters

The inspectors are looking for conditions 'unacceptable by U.S. standards.'
MEXICALI, Mexico (AP) -- U.S. inspectors flew to this Mexican border city late Sunday to visit onion exporters closed in the wake of a hepatitis outbreak that killed three people and sickened more than 600 others in Pennsylvania.
In a phone interview last week, John Guzewich, director of emergency coordination and response at the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said inspectors heading to Mexico would be "looking for conditions that are unacceptable by U.S. standards."
"These four firms that are implicated in this [investigation], we think all or some of them in some combination caused U.S. citizens to become ill and so we want to assure that they are not shipping contaminated food," Guzewich said.
Health officials reported that 615 hepatitis A cases, including three deaths, were linked to contaminated green onions from Mexico and served at a Chi-Chi's restaurant at the Beaver Valley Mall, about 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh.
Mexicali Valley
The inspectors' visit is expected to take the inspectors to the Mexicali Valley, where green onions make up 90 percent of the fruit and vegetables produced, as well as green onion-producing areas outside the border cities of Tijuana and Ensenada. Most of the onions from all three areas are exported to the United States, where they are distributed around the world.
Although it hasn't been proven that Mexico was to blame for the outbreak, sales of green onions across the border region have slumped dramatically since the outbreak.
Mexico's Agriculture Department responded by shutting down four green onion export companies -- three owned by U.S. firms -- because the plants did not comply with national health standards, said Javier Trujillo, director of the Mexican Agriculture Department's division of health, safety and quality.
Government offices in the United States and Mexico were closed Sunday and there was no one available to comment on exactly what the inspectors planned to do while in this country.
An FDA spokeswoman said Friday that the inspectors would be in Mexico at least two days, but that their schedule had yet to be determined.