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[FlirtyFilly]

Federal food safety workers who monitor dangerous bacteria have been recalled from furlough to track an outbreak of salmonella linked to Foster Farms chicken that has hospitalized a high proportion of victims, including some with hard-to-treat infections.

Nearly 300 people in 18 states have been sickened since about July by an outbreak of Salmonella Heidelberg traced to raw chicken from three sites run by the private California poultry producer, said Barbara Reynolds, a spokeswoman for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 42 percent of patients reporting complete information have been hospitalized, about double the proportion typically expected from a salmonella outbreak, Reynolds said. Of 183 complete cases, 76 patients have been hospitalized. Among those, many infections appear to be resistant to the most common antibiotics used to them, she added.

At least seven different strains of Salmonella Heidelberg have been tied to the outbreak, which led CDC officials on Tuesday to recall 30 staffers, including nine who work for the agency’s PulseNet team, which monitors the electronic fingerprint of dangerous foodborne bugs. They’d been on furlough because of a government shutdown stretching into its second week.

“We had said from the beginning that we were monitoring 30 outbreaks of foodborne illness,” Reynolds said. “This is one of them. It’s breaking loose now.”

The CDC move follows a USDA public health alert issued Monday for the raw chicken products. The agency’s Food Safety and Inspection Service has been unable to identify specific products or a specific production period for the potentially tainted chicken, but said that affected meat bears one of three establishment numbers inside a USDA inspection mark or elsewhere on the package.

The numbers are P6137, P6137A and P7632.

The chicken was distributed to retail outlets mainly in California, Oregon and Washington, but illnesses have been reported in 18 states. Those include Alaska, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Idaho, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.