Cause of E. coli outbreak in Europe may stay unknown

June 02, 2011|Associated Press

A farmer in Spain threw out a cucumber crop yesterday after he was unable… (Francisco Bonilla/Reuters )

BERLIN — European health officials tracking one of the worst E. coli outbreaks on record might never know where it came from. It is a sad fact of life in food poisoning cases: There is often no smoking gun.

The germ has sickened more than 1,500 people, mostly in Germany. Most patients who have been interviewed said they ate lettuce, tomatoes, or cucumbers, but officials testing produce across the continent have yet to find any vegetables with the particular strain involved.

Illnesses can occur days after tainted food is eaten and leftovers thrown out, so “the trail gets cold pretty quick,’’ said Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who specializes in food poisoning cases.

“They might never find the cause of the outbreak,’’ said Paul Hunter, professor of health protection at England’s University of East Anglia. “In most foodborne outbreaks, we don’t know definitively where the contaminated food came from.’’

Germany’s national health agency said yesterday that more than 1,530 people there had been sickened, including 17 dead and 470 suffering from a kidney failure complication.

The outbreak has hit at least nine European countries, but virtually all the sick people either live in Germany or recently traveled there. Two people who were sickened are now in the United States, and both had recently traveled to Hamburg.

Where the dangerous germ came from is just one of the questions health officials have. Another is why patients are suffering from kidney complications in an unusually high percentage of cases.

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