E coli outbreak: bean sprouts to blame

German authorities urge consumers to start eating cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce again Investigators have said German-grown bean sprouts are the cause of the E coli outbreak that has killed 29 people, the head of Germany’s national disease control centre announced on Friday. Reinhard Burger, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, which is responsible for disease control and prevention in Germany, said there was enough evidence to draw the conclusion even though no sprouts from an organic farm in Lower Saxony had tested positive for the E coli strain. “It was possible to narrow down epidemiologically the cause of the outbreak of the illness to the consumption of sprouts,” Burger said at a news conference. “It is the sprouts.” The sprouts were initially blamed for the outbreak on Sunday, but authorities backpedalled the following day after negative laboratory tests. The breakthrough in the investigation came when a taskforce linked patients who had fallen ill to 26 restaurants and cafeterias that had received produce from the organic farm. Helmut Tschiersky-Schöneburg, of Germany’s consumer protection agency, said: “It was like a crime thriller where you have to find the bad guy.” Andreas Hensel, the head of the country’s risk assessment agency, said: “They even studied the menus, the ingredients, looked at bills and took pictures of the different meals, which they then showed to those who had fallen ill.” Hensel said the authorities were lifting the warning against eating other foodstuffs. “Lettuce, tomatoes and cucumbers should be eaten again – it is all healthy produce,” he said. Burger said it was possible that all the tainted sprouts had been consumed or thrown away by now, but warned that people should not eat sprouts. While the farm in the northern German village of Bienenbuettel that has been blamed for the outbreak was shut down last Thursday and all its produce recalled, experts said they could not exclude the possibility that some tainted sprouts were still being used by restaurants and people could still get infected with E coli . Officials said it was possible that other nearby farms could be affected because it had not yet been established whether the seeds or the farm’s water had been contaminated. During the course of the investigation, non-lethal E coli was also found on cucumbers from Spain and beet sprouts from the Netherlands. E coli Food safety Food & drink Germany Europe guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 10, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.