Girl Scouts say cookies are all safe
Staff and wire reports
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
The peanut butter salmonella scare couldn’t have come at a worse time for local and national Girl Scouts as cookie sales just started, however, the organization said its peanut butter cookies are safe.
Sales of all cookies are going well, said Melissa Gray, of Girl Scouts of the Kansas Heartland. She said a first-grader had already sold 100 boxes of cookies since Saturday, when the sales started.
Gray said there have been a lot of questions about the peanut butter in the Girl Scout peanut butter cookies. The peanut butter cookies are made by ABC Bakers-Interbake Foods and the peanut butter doesn’t come from Peanut Corp. of America, which has been linked to the tainted peanut butter. The two types of cookies that the company makes for girl scouts is Peanut Butter Patties and Peanut Butter Sandwiches.
“ABC Bakers-Interbake Foods can assure the volunteers, parents, girls and customers of the Girl Scout Councils that work with us that the peanut butter in our cookies is not linked to the salmonella contamination,” according to a statement by ABC Bakers-Interbake Foods.
Gray said notes are being sent with girls who are selling cookies stating the cookies are safe to eat.
“We even had some troop leaders copy the information we had and put it on the order forms,” she said.
The Food and Drug Administration has traced the outbreak to a Georgia plant owned by Peanut Corp. of America, which makes peanut butter and peanut paste and sells it to institutions and food companies. The outbreak may have contributed to the deaths of six people and sickened more than 470 others in 43 states.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the salmonella bacteria behind the outbreak is common and not an unusually dangerous strain, but that the elderly or those with weakened immune systems are more at risk. At least five of the six people who died were elderly. All had salmonella when they died, though their exact causes of death haven’t been determined.
General Mills and grocers Kroger Co. — which owns Dillon’s — and Safeway have joined the growing list of food companies and retailers pulling items made with peanut butter from their store shelves.