E. Coli Death Toll Reaches 35 as Germany Warns it Could Rise

 The death toll from a killer bug outbreak centered on Germany rose to 35 Sunday as health officials said it was the worst of its kind on record and the government feared more people could die.
All but five cases were in people from or who had visited Germany.
"This wave of EHEC and haemolytic uraemic syndrome cases in Germany is the most significant recorded in the world to date," said Nele Boehme, spokeswoman for the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR).
After several frantic weeks of searching, German authorities on Friday said they had identified the source as being vegetable sprouts from an organic farm in Lower Saxony, northern Germany.
With German authorities only late last week dropping advice, particularly in northern Germany, to avoid uncooked tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, the scare has cost European farmers hundreds of millions of euros (dollars).
The RKI still recommends not eating raw vegetable sprouts.
Particularly badly hit were Spanish producers after Germany initially and erroneously blamed cucumbers grown there.

 

The Escherichia coli, or E.coli, outbreak in Germany was a rare kind, a team of researchers led by Helge Karch, a professor at the University of Muenster, told AFP.
The germ came from two strains that combined, the researchers told AFP. One strain -- enterohaemorragic E. coli (EHEC) -- releases poisons called Shiga toxins. The other strain -- enteroaggregative E. coli (EAEC) -- attaches itself in a "stacked brick" fashion to the intestinal lining cells called epithelial cells.

 Health officials in the northern city of Hamburg, which has been hit hard by the contamination blamed on infected vegetable sprouts, said the man born in 1920 had died after becoming infected with enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC).
German authorities on Friday identified vegetable sprouts as the source of the outbreak and lifted a warning against eating raw tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce.