WASHINGTON - The tomato scare has been declared over, but it has taken a toll - it has cost the industry an estimated $100 million and left millions of people with a new wariness about the safety of everyday foods.

An Associated Press-Ipsos poll finds that nearly half of consumers have changed their eating and buying habits in the past six months because they're afraid the food might be contaminated and make them sick.

They also overwhelmingly support setting up a better system to trace produce in an outbreak back to the source, the poll found.

The people who feel that way include the growers.

Virginia's East Coast Brokers, one of the largest tomato growers in the U.S., has been hammered by slumping demand and falling prices, although Virginia tomatoes were cleared early on, said sales manager Batista Madonia.

He said he's frustrated by the government's inability to find the root cause of the outbreak despite an investigation that has lasted almost two months.

The salmonella outbreak has sickened more than 1,200 people in 42 of the 50 states since the first cases were seen in April. Five Canadians, four of whom had recently visited the U.S., were also sickened.

"I guarantee in that time frame, more than 1,000 people were injured slipping on a banana peel," said Madonia.

Although federal officials lifted the tomato warning Thursday, the cause of the outbreak remains unknown. Hot peppers are under suspicion, and tomatoes have not been cleared everywhere.

While the poll found that three in four people remain confident about the overall safety of food, 46 per cent said they were worried they might get sick from eating contaminated products.

The same percentage said that because of safety warnings, they've avoided items they normally would have bought.

Christy Taylor, a first-grade teacher in California, said she has all but given up on supermarket produce and is buying most of her fresh fruits and vegetables at the local farmers' market.

"I see the same farmers every single week," said Taylor, 30, the mother of two-year-old twin girls. "You meet the people and you see where the (produce) is coming from."

Her twins love tomatoes, she said, and chomp on them as if they were apples.

However, until the mystery of the tainted food is solved, "I feel a little bit more comfortable, a little more safe, doing the local farmers' market," she said.

Eighty-six per cent in the poll said produce should be labelled so it can be tracked through layers of processors, packers and shippers, all the way back to the farm.

The lack of such a system frustrated disease detectives working on the salmonella outbreak.

However, the industry is divided over mandatory tracing technology, and Congress is running out of time to act on any major food safety changes before the Nov. 4 election.

The poll found that 80 per cent of Americans said they would support new federal standards for fresh produce.

Meat and poultry long have been subject in the U.S. to enforceable federal safeguards; fruits and vegetables are not, although produce increasingly is being implicated in outbreaks.

The high level of uneasiness should not be taken lightly, said Michael Taylor, a former senior federal food safety official who now teaches at George Washington University.

"When you have almost half the population avoiding certain foods because of safety concerns, that's very significant from the standpoint of economic impact for the people selling the food, and from the standpoint of peace of mind for consumers," Taylor said.

In addition to the salmonella outbreak, this year has seen the largest ground beef recall in history, which also raised consumer worries reflected in the poll.

The survey found sex, racial and economic gaps on attitudes about food safety.

Women, who do most of the shopping, were more worried than men.

For example, 39 per cent of men said they were "very confident" that the food they buy is safe, but only 23 per cent of women said they felt that way. However, men and women agreed on the need for better federal oversight.

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