BERLIN — After a month of searching and testing thousands of vegetables, detective work trumped science in the hunt for the source of the world’s deadliest E. coli outbreak. The culprit: German-grown sprouts.
Health officials announced Friday that sprouts from a farm in northern Germany caused the outbreak that has killed 31 people, sickened nearly 3,100 and prompted much of Europe to shun vegetables.
“It was like a crime thriller where you have to find the bad guy,” said Helmut Tschiersky-Schoeneburg, head of Germany’s consumer protection agency.
Health officials said they tracked the bacteria’s path from hospital patients struggling with diarrhea and kidney failure, to the restaurants where they had dined, to specific meals and ingredients they ate, and back to a single farm.
There are more questions to answer, including what contaminated the sprouts in the first place: Was it tainted seeds or water, or nearby animals? The answer is still elusive.
Still, it was little surprise that sprouts were the culprit. They have been blamed in at least 30 food-poisoning cases over the past 15 years in the U.S. and a large outbreak in Japan in 1996 that killed 11 people and sickened more than 9,000.
While sprouts are full of protein and vitamins, their growing conditions and the fact that they are mostly eaten raw make them ideal transmitters of disease.
Interviews with thousands of patients — mostly women ages 20 to 50 with healthy lifestyles — led investigators to conclude initially that salads could be the problem.
“You get this stuff in every cafeteria,” said Gert Hahne, spokesman for the Agriculture Ministry in Lower Saxony, the state where the contaminated sprouts were found. “But after two weeks of diarrhea, most people don’t remember if they had a few sprouts on top of a ham sandwich or mixed into a salad.”
Inspectors visited more than 400 farms in Lower Saxony alone, and the state put 1,000 people on the case, including health authorities, food inspectors and veterinarians.
Patients mentioned they had eaten sprouts, and inspectors visited a small organic farm near the village of Bienenbuettel that grows many different types, including alfalfa, radish, onion, broccoli, garlic, linseed, wheat and sunflower varieties.
After tests turned up negative — a common result in E. coli investigations, when the offending food is usually consumed before the probe begins — authorities started looking into the farm’s delivery records.
That took them to a golf club in Lueneburg, a restaurant in Luebeck, another in Rothenburg/Wuemme and cafeterias in Frankfurt, Darmstadt and Bochum — all places where customers had fallen ill.
The Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control center, questioned 112 people who had eaten at a single restaurant, including 19 who had fallen ill. All of the sick people had consumed produce from the suspect farm.
Twenty-six clusters of sickened people were identified — and another 30 are under investigation — all connected to the farm.
Then came the nearly smoking gun: On Wednesday, it was confirmed that three farm workers had fallen ill from E. coli in early May, when the outbreak first started.
What not to eat
WASHINGTON — Sprouts might not be as healthy as you thought. Now implicated in an outbreak that has killed 31 people in Europe, they are a frequent culprit in foodborne illness.
The U.S. government recommends that the very young, elderly, pregnant and others with compromised immune systems stay away from raw sprouts completely and that anyone who eats sprouts cook them first. Federal officials recommend that people ask that raw sprouts not be added to their food at restaurants.
Sprouts need warm and humid conditions to grow — precisely the same conditions required by bugs like E. coli and salmonella to thrive. The Associated Press
