Hawai'i health inspectors yesterday found some jars of Peter Pan brand peanut butter on store shelves from a production source linked to a national outbreak of salmonella.

Nearly 300 people in 39 states have fallen ill since August, federal officials said. The Hawai'i Health Department was not aware of any cases here, department spokeswoman Janice Okubo said.

The state Health Department sent out notices to retailers asking them to pull jars with a product code beginning with "2111" on the lid. During spot checks, inspectors did find some jars with the "2111" code number and those were removed by retailers, Okubo said.

The "2111" code number indicates the peanut butter came from the ConAgra Foods Inc. plant in Sylvester, Ga., were the contaminated product was produced, federal investigators said.

Okubo said the Hawai'i Health Department will be monitoring reports of salmonella-related illnesses because of the possible presence of contaminated batches here.

Wal-Mart's Great Value house brand peanut butter, also manufactured by ConAgra, may also be affected. As a precaution, all local Wal-Mart stores received a recall notice yesterday morning to pull its stock, an official at Wal-Mart SuperCenter in Pearl City said.

Government scientists struggled yesterday to pinpoint the source of the first U.S. salmonella outbreak linked to peanut butter, and shoppers across the country were warned to throw out jars with a product code on the lid beginning with "2111."

How the dangerous germ got into the peanut butter is a mystery. But because peanuts are usually heated to high, germ-killing temperatures during the manufacturing process, government and industry officials said the contamination may have been caused by dirty jars or equipment.

"We think we have very strong evidence that this was the brand of peanut butter," said Dr. Mike Lynch, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. "Now it goes to the next step of going to the place where the peanut butter was made and focusing in on the testing."

ConAgra said it is not clear how many jars are affected by the recall. But the plant is the sole producer of the nationally distributed Peter Pan brand, and the recall covers all peanut butter — smooth and chunky alike — produced by the plant from May 2006 until now.

"We're talking a lot of jars of peanut butter," said Dr. David Acheson, chief medical officer of the Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition.

FDA inspectors visited the now shut-down plant Wednesday and yesterday to try to pinpoint where the contamination could have happened. The FDA last inspected the plant in 2005. Testing was also being done on at least some the salmonella victims' peanut butter jars, but investigators said some may have already been discarded.

The highest number of cases were reported in New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Tennessee and Missouri. About 20 percent of all the ill were hospitalized, and there were no deaths, the CDC said.

About 85 percent of the infected people said they ate peanut butter, and about a quarter of them ate it at least once a day, the CDC's Lynch said. It was the only food that most of the patients had all recently eaten.

Salmonella sickens about 40,000 people a year in the U.S. and kills about 600. It can cause diarrhea, fever, dehydration, abdominal pain and vomiting.

But most cases of salmonella poisoning are caused by undercooked eggs and chicken. The only known salmonella outbreak in peanut butter — in Australia during the mid-1990s — was blamed on unsanitary plant conditions.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.