The recent egg contamination is one of the largest salmonella outbreaks ever recorded in the US.

"The only thing she likes to snack on is peanut butter on bread. So that's all she was eating," he says.

But as the Napiers soon discovered, peanut butter was at the center of a nationwide outbreak of salmonella. By the time doctors identified it as the culprit, Nellie was hospitalized. Her organs soon shut down.

Randy says she was in tremendous pain. "It was about four, five days of - excuse the language - just utter hell."

She died on January 26. Eight others died during the outbreak and more than 700 people in 46 states got sick.

Massive recall

The US Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, recalled nearly 4,000 products and countless individual items, including crackers, cookies, cereal, ice cream and even dog food.

The scope of the outbreak surprised Randy Napier and many others. "I could not even imagine something you go into the store and you buy off the shelf would kill you."

All those products on store shelves across the country had one thing in common: they all contained peanuts produced by a single company: the Peanut Corporation of America.

This month, a new salmonella outbreak has triggered an FDA recall of more than 500 million eggs produced by two closely-linked farms.

The reason for these huge outbreaks has a lot to do with how Americans get their food today. Food manufacturers have gotten bigger and more efficient, pushing out small, local operations.

Says epidemiologist Robert Wallace at the University of Iowa: "Foods are produced in large quantities and distributed widely across the country. And when there's a problem in the safety of that food, a lot of people are then exposed, and it's over a broad geographic area. And that's really the problem."

Illness not on the rise

But despite the big numbers when problems occur, Wallace says it's hard to know whether America's overall food safety is really suffering, that's because most cases of food poisoning go unreported.

According to the best data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, rates of salmonella infection haven't changed much in the last decade, and rates of many other food borne illnesses are declining.

While it's impossible to reduce outbreaks to zero, America's food supply is one of the safest in the world, says Kelli Ludlum with the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation's largest farmers' group. "That distribution is also what allows us to enjoy foods that we probably wouldn't be able to otherwise," she says.

And she adds that Americans have made trade-offs for their modern food supply.

"Personally, I wouldn't want to go back to the food supply of 50 years ago. I don't cook that much. I certainly don't can [preserve], so having to provide for myself all those things would be more than just inconvenient."

Outdated law

But while the way Americans feed themselves has changed over the last 50 years, Erik Olson points out that the law governing food safety haven't, he is head of food safety at the Pew Charitable Trusts, a research and advocacy group.

"Right now in the United States, we have an antiquated law that's over 70 years old," he says, "and it reacts to contamination problems rather than preventing them."

Congress is considering updating that law, and the latest outbreak may give that effort a push.

The Farm Bureau's Kelli Ludlum says the food industry supports many of the proposed changes. "Certainly FDA does need more resources. We've said that for a long time. And they need more direction on how to use those resources."

The House of Representatives passed a food safety bill last year, but the Senate has not passed its version. Randy Napier, who lost his mother to Salmonella, is heading to Washington, DC soon with a message for his senators.

"Granted, things are going to cost a little more to be safer," he says. "But it has to be safer. It has to be. Or the people are just gonna keep dying."

salmonella: a type of bacteria that makes people sick if they eat infected food; an illness caused by this bacteria（沙門菌）

culprit: a person or thing responsible for causing a problem（肇事者；引起問題的事物）

trade-off: the act of balancing two things that you need or want but which are opposed to each other （在需要而又相互對立的兩者間的）權(quán)衡，協(xié)調(diào)

antiquated: old-fashioned and no longer suitable for modern conditions（過時的；陳舊的）

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（來源：VOA 編輯：陳丹妮）