E coli mystery deepens

2011-06-04 14:51

Hamburg - An outbreak of killer E coli that has spread to 12 countries and killed 19 people may be linked to a Hamburg festival in May and could have caused a 20th death, according to reports on Saturday.

As authorities continued to hunt the source of the killer bug, Germany's national disease centre, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), is looking closely at a harbour festival that took place in Hamburg on May 6-8.

The weekly newspaper Focus said on Saturday the festival drew 1.5 million visitors from Germany and abroad and noted that the first reported case of E coli infection followed just a week later in the city's university hospital.

German media also said on Saturday a man in his 50s who died in Brandenberg may be the 20th victim but the cause of death was uncertain because he had several other infections as well as E. coli.

The latest confirmed death was of an 80-year-old woman in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Friday.
She succumbed as German authorities were still warning consumers off raw vegetables, despite the EU's Reference Laboratory for E coli in Rome saying scientific tests had failed to support a link to the outbreak.

Faced with uncertainty over the source of the outbreak, reports said police were investigating a possible deliberate act and were checking two restaurants in the northern town of Lubeck, one in which 17 diners fell ill and another in which eight women were sickened.

On Thursday Germany authorities said the number of new infections appeared to be stabilising.

But Reinhard Brunkhorst, president of the German Nephrology Society, added: "We are dealing here in fact with the biggest epidemic caused by bacteria in recent decades."

All but one of the fatalities since the outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E coli (EHEC) poisoning began last month have occurred in Germany. A patient who died in Sweden had recently returned from Germany.

2 000 cases of people falling ill

Regional German health authorities have reported more than 2 000 cases of people falling ill with EHEC poisoning, with symptoms including stomach cramps, diarrhoea, fever and vomiting.

The fact that a large majority are female suggests that the source is "probably something that women prefer more than men," Andrea Ellis, an epidemiologist at the World Health Organisation's (WHO) department of food safety, said in Geneva.

In some cases the infection can lead to bloody diarrhoea and potentially life-threatening conditions such as haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS), a kidney disease.

At least 552 people, 520 of them in Germany, have HUS, according to the WHO, with 10 other European countries plus the United States reporting HUS or EHEC infections.

The outbreak was "the largest epidemic of HUS to have occurred anywhere in the world," according to Francois-Xavier Weill, head of France's National Reference Centre for E coli.
Britain confirmed four more cases of poisoning on Friday, bringing the total number of infected in the country to 11.

Each is related to German travel and three of the patients have HUS, the Health Protection Agency said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel meanwhile defended last week's false cucumber alert in a phone call on Thursday with Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, saying authorities were "duty-bound to inform the public at all times."

The advisory, retracted this week, left tens of thousands of tonnes of Spanish produce unsold, costing Spanish growers an estimated 200 million euros a week.

Both Berlin and Madrid said they had agreed to seek compensation at the European level.

Hungary, which currently holds the rotating EU presidency, said it aimed to hold an extraordinary meeting of the bloc's farm ministers to discuss the outbreak, most likely on June 17.

With no clarity on the source of the mysterious bacteria, the outbreak has led some countries such as Russia and Lebanon to ban vegetables from the EU, in moves criticised by the 27-member bloc.

- AFP