A bankruptcy trustee says claims have been filed for 154 people who say they were sickened by a salmonella outbreak traced to a Virginia peanut company.

A Houston lawyer representing people sickened by the salmonella outbreak linked to a Virginia-based peanut processor plans to file about 55 claims for compensation.

Two subsidiaries of Peanut Corporation of America filed for bankruptcy this month as part of the parent company’s Chapter 7 proceedings.

An attorney representing victims of the salmonella outbreak is set to tour the Peanut Corp. of America processing plant in Georgia linked to the nationwide salmonella outbreak.

The battered peanut industry has a new message: Peanuts are safe to eat, and there’s a law in the works to make them even safer. So have a handful.

The shuttered Texas plant owned by a peanut company blamed in a national salmonella outbreak that sickened nearly 700 people was fined a record $14.6 million on Thursday.

TERRA BELLA, Calif.  — A nationwide recall of 2 million pounds of pistachios in the wake of a salmonella scare has increased calls for more stringent food testing laws.

The owner of a plant leased to a Lynchburg-based peanut processor blamed for a nationwide salmonella outbreak is suing the company.

WASHINGTON — The food industry’s private inspection system failed to catch filthy conditions at a peanut company blamed for a nationwide salmonella outbreak because the firm itself hired the inspectors, lawmakers said Thursday.

Peanut Corp. of America’s accounting manager gave the company’s first public response Thursday to questions relating to the nationwide salmonella outbreak that forced the company into bankruptcy.

Documents filed in U.S. Bankruptcy Court show the peanut processor at the heart of a nationwide salmonella outbreak has nearly $11.4 million in assets and debts of $4.8 million.

Tests have confirmed that peanut butter made from peanuts processed at a Texas plant contains the same strain of salmonella blamed for sickening hundreds in a national outbreak, federal officials said Tuesday.

When the full story of Stewart Parnell and his company’s role in a nationwide salmonella outbreak is told, his friends said the story also will show him as a good businessman, a Bedford County dad and grandfather, and a caring man who never would hurt anyone.

The peanut processor at the heart of the national salmonella outbreak has shut down the last of its plants, which was the only one that hasn’t been linked to possible contamination, an attorney for the company said Tuesday.

David Charnock, a disabled cancer patient who lives on Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay, relies on free medical airlifts to make it to the hospital in Norfolk, and the pilot who volunteers to fly him there is Stewart Parnell.