At least three people have been hospitalized for salmonella poisoningIn the last few days, Nadine Scharf’s life has been turned upside down. The culprit? Sprouts, those raw, bland stringy things that fluff up sandwiches and salads.Scharf co-owns Evergreen Produce, the tiny Idaho-based company recently implicated by the Food and Drug Administration as the source behind 21 cases of salmonella poisoning, including nine in Washington state. But Scharf tells Seattle Weekly that not only has the FDA yet to turn up solid evidence against her company, but it’s also threatening to put her out of business while it makes its case.It all started in early June, when the FDA started to connect the dots between scattered cases of salmonella poisoning.Last week, inspectors visited Evergreen’s facility and mailed samples of sprouts to their main lab for comprehensive testing. But the samples vanished en-route.As a result, the FDA doesn’t know, and likely won’t for several more days, whether Evergreen is the culprit. In the meantime, Scharf says the controversy is threatening to destroy her business. Less than a day after the FDA issued a formal warning, the company, which usually sells 6,000 pounds of sprouts a week, had already lost 75 percent of its business and laid off 10 of its 14 workers. “Here we are, skeleton crew, very little orders,” says Scharf. “We still have overhead, we still have our bills, and no income.”Following a deadly E. coli outbreak in Germany that killed almost 50, media outlets like CNN and Fox News picked up on the story. Many cited Scharf’s refusal to issue a voluntary recall, giving the impression of a stubborn company unconcerned that its customers have come down with a possibly fatal infection. Scharf, however, says she hasn’t “refused” anything.She claims that the batch of sprouts the FDA thinks is contaminated expired two weeks ago, so there’s no need for a recall because there’s no longer a product to be recalled. Warnings in recent days from the FDA and the Center for Disease Control are unnecessarily dragging Evergreen’s name through the mud, she says.When asked about Scharf’s allegations, FDA spokeswoman Stephanie Yao tells Seattle Weekly that the agency is limited in the information it can share because the case is ongoing. “We are still gathering the pertinent facts,” she says.