Minnesota health officials announced Monday that tests have confirmed that the peanut butter that was recalled contained the salmonella bacteria that sickened more than 400 people in 43 states with Mississippi joining the list.

Last week state health and agriculture officials said they had found salmonella bacteria in King Nut peanut butter at a nursing facility in Minnesota and the sample was tested over the weekend to try and find a genetic match. 

In a statement the health department said, "Minnesota Departments of Agriculture and Health lab tests conducted last week discovered Salmonella bacteria in a 5-pound (2 kg) package of King Nut peanut butter collected from a long-term care facility associated with one of the reported illnesses." The department said the peanut butter has been conclusively linked as the source of the 30 cases of salmonella poisoning in Minnesota. The Centers for Disease Control, in a release later Monday, said the outbreak may have contributed to three deaths.

They zeroed in on the peanut butter as the likely source as it was a common agent in many of the reported salmonella sickness. Doug Schultz, a spokesman with the Minnesota Department of Health said, "The commonality among all of our patients was that they ate peanut butter." A majority of the patients had consumed the same brand he added.

King Nut Companies of Solon, Ohio said it's asked its customers to stop using peanut butter under its King Nut and Parnell's Pride brands with a lot code that begins with the numeral "8." The company supplies only through food service providers who distribute the product to hospitals, schools, restaurants, nursing homes and other such institutions and is not sold directly to consumers.

 Company president and chief executive Martin Kanan said "We did not want to wait around for the results." He however added that King Nut could not be the cause of the nationwide salmonella outbreak as the company only distributes to seven states which include Ohio, Minnesota, Michigan, North Dakota, Arizona, Idaho and New Hampshire.

Kanan felt the contamination could have come from another source as the salmonella was found in an open container. "That means there's a possibility of cross-contamination, somebody could have been cutting a piece of chicken and then stuck the knife into the peanut butter for a peanut butter sandwich," he said. "There have been no tests that have come back positive on a closed container."

Schultz on the other hand said only the top of the container would test positive if the contamination had come from another source and out of the 13 samples taken from the container four samples from different parts of the container tested positive for salmonella. They were to test unopened samples of peanut butter to confirm their result.

King Nut, distributed peanut butter manufactured by Peanut Corporation of America, a Virginia company and its President Stewart Parnell said in an e-mail earlier Monday, the company was working with federal authorities.