The European Commission yesterday said it would demand that Russia explain its “disproportionate” decision to ban imports of all fresh vegetables from EU countries over a bacteria outbreak.
“It’s disproportionate,” said Frederic Vincent, health spokesman for the EU’s executive arm.
“The commission will write to Russian authorities to demand an explanation. This represents between 3 [billion] and 4 billion euros [US$4.3 billion to US$5.76 billion] in European products exported each year,” he said.
Photo: EPA
Gennady Onishchenko, the head of Russia’s consumer protection agency, said earlier that the ban had taken effect yesterday morning and that all vegetables already shipped in from the EU would be seized across Russia.
Russia had banned imports of vegetables from Germany and Spain on Monday over the E. coli outbreak, which has killed at least 17 people and made more than 1,500 others ill in eight European countries. Its source is unknown.
Onishchenko said his agency had issued an order on the ban to Russia’s customs service and also ordered raw vegetables from the EU removed from store shelves, Interfax reported. He urged Russians to be alert and to eat domestically grown vegetables
“We are imposing a ban -because the situation has not been brought under control in a month. The sources of the infection and factors in its spread have not been established,” state-run RIA quoted Onishchenko as saying. “The situation has worsened sharply in recent days and so we are forced to take these extremely unpopular measures.”
German authorities were still searching for the source of the bacteria after they wrongly blamed the outbreak on Spanish cucumbers.
Late on Wednesday the European Commission lifted its warning on Spanish cucumbers. It said tests carried out on cucumbers in Germany and in Spain “did not confirm the presence of the specific serotype [O104], which is responsible for the outbreak affecting humans.”
Meanwhile, Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said Madrid would seek compensation for Spanish cucumbers being blamed for the outbreak.
“Yesterday [Wednesday], it became clear, with the analyses carried out by the Spanish agency for food safety, that there is not the slightest indication that the origin of the serious infection is any Spanish product,” he said in an interview with Spanish national radio.
“Therefore, I would have liked a clearer reaction from the commission,” he said. “Now we have a very ambitious task ahead of us, which is to recover our good reputation as soon as possible.”
In other developments, Chinese scientists said yesterday that the European epidemic has been caused by a new strain of E. coli that carries genes giving it resistance to some classes of antibiotics.
GENOME SEQUENCING
The scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute, who are collaborating with University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, completed sequencing the genome of the bacterium in three days after receiving its DNA samples.
“This E. coli is a new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic,” the scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen said in a press release.
They said the bacterium was closely related to another E. coli strain, called EAEC 55989, which was found in central Africa and known to cause serious diarrhea.
The University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf found many of the patients did not respond to some of the antibiotics used, the Chinese scientists said, adding that their analysis showed the bacterium “carries several antibiotic resistant genes, including resistance to aminoglycoside, macrolides and Beta-lactam antibiotics.”
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