An expert at the WHO says time is running out for German investigators to find the source of the world’s deadliest E. coli outbreak, which has spread fear across Europe and cost farmers millions in exports.
German officials are still seeking the cause of the outbreak weeks after it began early last month. In the last week, they have wrongly accused Spanish cucumbers and then German sprouts of sparking the crisis that has killed 22 people and infected over 2,400.
“If we don’t know the likely culprit in a week’s time, we may never know the cause,” Guenael Rodier, the director of communicable diseases expert at WHO, said yesterday.
He said the contaminated vegetables have likely disappeared from the market and it would be difficult for German investigators to link patients to contaminated produce weeks after they first became infected.
“Right now, [Germans] are -interviewing people about foods they ate about a month ago,” he said. “It’s very hard to know how accurate that information is.”
Other experts issued harsher criticism of the German investigation and wondered why it was taking so long to identify the source.
“If you gave us 200 cases and five days, we should be able to solve this outbreak,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, whose team has contained numerous food-borne outbreaks in the US.
Osterholm described the German effort as “erratic” and “a disaster” and said officials should have done more detailed patient interviews as soon as the epidemic began.
Osterholm said the Germans should have been able to trace cases of illness to infected produce by now and that tests on current produce won’t be helpful.
The EU health chief yesterday warned Germany against premature — and inaccurate — conclusions on the source of contaminated food. The comments by EU health chief John Dalli came only a day after he had defended the German investigators, saying they were under extreme pressure.
Dalli told the EU parliament in Strasbourg that information must be scientifically sound and foolproof before it becomes public.
Tests are continuing on sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany, but have so far come back negative.
The outbreak has killed 22 people.
Germany’s national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, yesterday raised the number of infections in Germany to 2,325, with another 100 cases in 10 other European countries and the US. The number of victims hospitalized in intensive care with a rare, serious complication that may lead to kidney failure rose by 12 to 642.
Meanwhile, the EU was to propose offering at least 150 million euros (US$219 million) in compensation to farmers affected by the E. coli outbreak, the European commissioner for agriculture said yesterday.
Arriving for a meeting of EU agriculture ministers in Luxembourg, EU Minister of Agriculture Dacian Ciolos said the money would go to growers of fresh vegetables such as tomatoes, lettuces and cucumbers whose businesses have been affected by the outbreak.
EU fresh produce association Freshfel Europe said the latest estimates put the weekly economic damage at about 80 million euros in the Netherlands, 20 million euros Germany, 4 million euros in Belgium and 3 euros million in Portugal, not to mention the 200 million euros in Spain.
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