BERLIN — After days of confusion, German authorities said on Friday that they had concluded that contaminated sprouts from an organic farm in the country's north were the most likely cause of one of the world's worst outbreaks of E. coli.
Officials acknowledged, however, that laboratory tests to confirm the findings had produced only negative results and that questions remained about how the sprouts were contaminated in the first place.
To reach their conclusion, health officials said they relied on an epidemiological study of the pattern of infection among patients, tracking suspected pathogens along the food chain from hospital beds, to restaurants and back to the farm, southeast of Hamburg, at Bienenbüttel.
Hours after the announcement in Berlin, officials in a different region — North Rhine-Westphalia — said they had, for the first time, identified the pathogens thought to be causing the outbreak in a package of bean sprouts from the same farm.
Johannes Remmel, the state consumer protection minister, said the discovery — in a garbage can at the home of two infected patients in Cologne — meant that it was "becoming increasingly more likely that bean sprouts" from the farm caused the outbreak. Other officials cautioned that the findings still needed to be confirmed.
Friday's announcement seemed intended to assure Germans that foods earlier suspected of containing toxins — cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce — were now safe to eat. But many shopkeepers remained angry over the handling of the crisis.
"The whole thing is a big scandal," said Riza Cetinkaya, 24, who works in her father's grocery store in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin where, she said, sales had dropped about 70 percent.
"People were very unsettled. Every day something difference was announced," Ms. Cetinkaya said. "Now I hear on the radio that it was the sprouts. But people were living buying less fruit. That is simply insane."
The outbreak claimed at least 30 lives in Germany, unsettled the nation and threw European agriculture into disarray. While the authorities had made "decisive progress," the outbreak "is not yet over," said Reinhard Burger, the head of the Robert Koch Institute, the country's disease control agency, because new cases will still be reported.
At a news conference here, Mr. Burger said the institute's scientists did not yet know how pathogens came into contact with the sprouts or whether some of the contaminated produce was still in circulation.
As the outbreak spread, German authorities placed blame on cucumbers, tomatoes or lettuce imported from Spain and urged people, particularly in northern Germany where the outbreak seems to have its epicenter, to avoid the products.
On Friday, German health officials declared cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce to be safe, but said consumers should still avoid the consumption of raw sprouts — a popular addition to salads and ready-made sandwiches.
"It is possible that the source of the infection has now been exhausted, that is to say, that the food has either been eaten or thrown away," Mr. Burger said.
By studying the pattern of the infection as it spread, he said, "it was possible to narrow down epidemiologically the highly probable cause of the outbreak of the illness to the consumption of sprouts."
"It was the sprouts," Mr. Burger said.
He said investigators had examined 112 people, 19 of whom had been infected with E. coli during a group visit to a single restaurant, and had examined recipes for the food they had eaten, spoken to the chefs and even examined photographs they had taken of one another with their choice of food on the table.
The aim was "to discover exactly how each meal prepared, which ingredients went into it," he said. The result was that customers who ate sprouts were found to be almost nine times more likely to be infected than other diners. It was this trail that led health inspectors to the organic farm where the sprouts originated.
On Friday, state authorities in Lower Saxony said they had sealed off the farm and ordered its operators to suspend sales of any other products. The state agriculture minister, Gert Lindemann, said the owners of the farm had agreed on Sunday to stop selling produce after the facility came under suspicion.
The outbreak has been particularly virulent because, the German authorities say, it has led to a potentially lethal complication — known as hemolytic uremic syndrome, or H.U.S. — that causes kidney failure and neurological damage.
In a separate statement on its Web site on Friday, the Robert Koch Institute said the number of new cases of E. coli being reported was "clearly lower." The death toll in Germany now stood at 30, which included 21 people who had died of the H.U.S. complication. Over all, 2,988 people had been infected, 759 of them with HUS.
In addition to the 30 deaths in Germany, one was reported in Sweden.
The outbreak spread alarm across Europe, with Spanish farmers demanding compensation after demand for their crops plummeted and farmers in Germany and other European countries said demand for cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes had slumped so much that they were forced to dump tons of unsold produce.
In response to the spread of E. coli, Russia banned all imports of vegetables from Europe, causing an outcry among European farmers that one of its biggest markets had been closed down.
Russia promised Friday to lift its ban once the European Union provides documented proof of their safety, according to news reports from Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River, where President Dmitri A. Medvedev met with senior European Union leaders.
"We are ready to resume the shipments under guarantees of the European Union authorities," Mr. Medvedev was quoted as saying at a news conference. It was not clear what kind of guarantees would satisfy the Russian authorities.
No comments:
Post a Comment