In the midst of the current peanut contamination scare, there may be some comfort in knowing that salmonella is not America's most lethal food-borne illness.

It is the most common one, though, and in the present outbreak, it has sickened 600 people around the nation, including 17 in Pennsylvania, and may have killed eight.

Two of those infected were in Western Pennsylvania: a patient in Butler County and a 45-year-old man in Allegheny County who got sick after eating peanut butter crackers and has since recovered.

As a U.S. House committee plans a hearing on the salmonella outbreak today, the tainted peanuts from a small plant in Georgia have now officially caused the largest product recall in national history, as measured by the number or products affected.

As of Sunday, the Food and Drug Administration had listed nearly 1,850 separate products that had been recalled, from cookies and crackers to granola bars and ice cream.

Even though no major peanut butter brands were affected, many customers were shying away from the staple, even if they or their children had serious peanut butter-and-jelly habits, news reports indicated.

At Giant Eagle, the region's largest grocery chain, officials said none of their peanut butter brands was affected, and only two Giant Eagle brand products had to be pulled from the shelves. The chain also programmed its cash registers to block purchase of any recalled products that might somehow make it to the checkout line.

Salmonella is a family of bacteria that causes gastrointestinal illness and diarrhea. The particular strain identified in the latest outbreak, Salmonella Typhimurium, comes from animal feces, and inspections at the accused Peanut Corporation of America plant in Georgia have shown evidence of rodent infestations.

The company now faces a criminal investigation after the FDA discovered evidence that it had been shipping peanut products from the Georgia plant since 2007 that it knew were infected with salmonella.

Lee H. Harrison, an infectious disease expert at the University of Pittsburgh, said salmonella is not necessarily hard to disinfect from machinery or raw food once it has been discovered.

But if it makes it into a food supply and dries out, it becomes extremely difficult to eradicate, he said.

That helps explain why it is the leading cause of foodborne illness in the nation, infecting about 15 of every 100,000 people in the population. It is closely followed by another bacteria which is much less well known, campylobacter, which often contaminates poultry.

All the illnesses identified in the present outbreak could be traced to PCA's plant in Blakely, Ga. The company also shut down another plant in Plainview, Texas, this week after salmonella was found there as well.

The fact that a relatively small plant could affect such a huge number of products points to the increasing globalization of the food industry, experts said.

Martin Bucknavage, a food safety expert at Penn State University, noted that America now imports more than 15 percent of its food, up from 2 to 3 percent several years ago.

And even small domestic plants ship to so many customers now that they can sicken people all over the nation instead of just in their own regions, he said.

In preparation for today's hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the Consumers Union, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine, called for broader powers and tougher food inspections by the FDA.

"The FDA is supposed to be a watchdog for consumers, and for too long, this agency has been coming up short," said Jean Halloran, director of food policy initiatives for the federation. "The FDA has been so severely weakened by cutbacks in staffing and funding, and is so poorly equipped to deal with today's food industry ... that it can no longer keep food safe."

But Mr. Bucknavage, who spent much of his career as a food safety official at processing companies, and Douglas Archer, a University of Florida professor who was once a top FDA official, said improving food safety requires much more than simply beefing up the FDA.

One of the most successful food safety initiatives in the past decade, they said, was actually pushing more of the responsibility onto industry through a system known as Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points.

Adopted by the seafood and fruit industries, the system requires companies to identify the key parts of their production processes where contamination could occur, and to come up with plans to prevent that.

Even though companies oversee this process, the two men said, they must keep records that can be examined by government inspectors at any time.

Dr. Archer, who retired in 1994 as deputy director of FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said another key reform would be to make FDA's inspection procedures more efficient.

The agency's inspection rules now occupy hundreds of pages, he said, and too often, inspectors are bogged down with paperwork, which limits how many plants they can visit.

It would be better for FDA inspectors to make more site visits looking for egregious violations, and then schedule detailed examinations at the worst plants, Dr. Archer said.

"In my view," he said, "an inspector could have walked into that plant in Georgia, and with the way it's been described in the news, with the leaky roof and rats and cockroaches, he would have said this place has some defects, and then he could say 'Let's go back and do some sampling and do a more detailed inspection.' "