E. coli death toll reaches 35; Germany warns of
more
BERLIN: The death toll from a killer bug outbreak
centred on Germany rose on Sunday to at least 35 as the government
warned of more to come, despite the source having been identified
and new infections falling.
"More fatalities cannot be ruled out, painful though
it is to say so," Health Minister Daniel Bahr told the Bild am
Sonntag newspaper, two days after the source was identified as
vegetable sprouts grown in northern Germany.
"The continuing fall in the number of new infections
gives grounds for optimism. But that does not rule out more cases
of EHEC (enterohaemorrhagic E. coli)," he said.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany's national disease agency,
said on Sunday meanwhile that the death toll had risen to 35, but
that the rate of new infections had continued to abate.
"The outbreak is receding," RKI spokesman Guenther Dettweiler told
AFP.
All but one of the 35 deaths from EHEC poisoning have been in
Germany, with the other being a woman in Sweden who had recently
travelled to Germany.
Some 3,255 people have also fallen sick in 14 European countries
plus the United States and Canada, according to the World Health
Organisation. All but five cases were in people who lived or had
visited Germany.
Many are seriously ill with bloody diarrhoea and potentially
life-threatening conditions such as haemolytic uraemic syndrome
(HUS), a serious kidney ailment.
The WHO said on Saturday that 812 people had HUS, 773 of them in
Germany.
In Germany, some 100 patients have such bad kidney damage that they
need an organ transplant "or will require dialysis treatment for
the rest of their lives", said Karl Lauterbach, health expert for
the Social Democrats party.
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.
The farm has been closed and all its products recalled. The farm
cultivated sprouts from a variety of products including lettuce,
azuki beans, mung beans, fenugreek, alfalfa and lentils.
Authorities have said though that the farm in the northern village
of Bienenbuettel had done nothing wrong, with Gert Lindemann, Lower
Saxony agriculture minister, saying it had "high hygiene
standards".
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 European Commission has offered 210 million euros ($303
million) to farmers affected across Europe.
Russia also banned the import of all fresh vegetables from the
whole of the 27-nation European Union. Moscow agreed at a summit
with the EU on Friday to lift the ban.
- AFP/de
