Musician Ralph Tourkow is fondly remembered as a talented musician who had a jovial sense of humor and a schedule of dinner dates.His family and friends agree that to meet Tourkow was to instantly meet a friend.OWENSVILLE – An attorney for a southwestern Indiana farm linked to a deadly salmonella outbreak says testing by a microbiologist hired by the farm suggests the bacteria that caused the outbreak didn’t come from the farm’s fields.
Chamberlain Farms’ attorney, Gary Zhao, said in a statement Thursday that the “overwhelming evidence” points to land adjacent to the Owensville farm’s melon fields as the likely source of the bacterial contamination federal investigators found on the farm’s cantaloupes.
He says that means the farm’s packing facilities, equipment or operations weren’t the source of the salmonella.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently asked the farm for specifics on how it’s addressed unclean conditions at its fruit-packing plant. Investigators say last summer’s outbreak sickened 261 people in 24 states and killed three people in Kentucky.
