Deadly E. Coli Outbreak Linked to German Sprouts

Gert Lindemann, the agriculture minister in the northern state of Lower Saxony, said in Hanover that Germans should not eat sprouts until further notice, with definitive test results available Monday. Mr. Lindemann said that the authorities could not yet rule out other possible sources for the outbreak and urged Germans to continue avoiding tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce.

The suggestion that sprouts may be the cause of the outbreak, one of the most catastrophic food-borne illnesses in years, was met with caution by public health experts.

“We would want either epidemiological evidence or confirmed laboratory evidence,” said Dr. Robert Tauxe, deputy director of food-borne diseases for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

The German authorities had acted prematurely once before in their investigation, blaming cucumbers grown in Spain for the outbreak after preliminary tests showed that they might have contained toxic E. coli bacteria. Further tests showed that the Spanish cucumbers did not contain the strain making people sick, and investigators then backtracked.

That episode infuriated Spanish farmers who lost tens of millions of dollars in sales and were forced to abandon ripe vegetables to rot in the fields, as demand collapsed.

The outbreak in Germany, which the health authorities first reported in late May, is caused by a rare strain of toxic E. coli that can cause bloody diarrhea. In extreme cases it can cause acute kidney failure and death. In previous outbreaks involving other strains of E. coli, kidney failure appeared most often among children. In this outbreak, most victims with kidney failure have been adults and more than two-thirds have been women.

The outbreak showed no signs of abating on Sunday, with Germany’s national disease control center reporting that the death toll had risen to 22 and that 2,153 people were ill, more than 600 of them in intensive care.

Mr. Lindemann said that locally grown bean sprouts were the “most convincing” cause, and that the farm that grew them in the Uelzen area had been shut down. But he said 18 sprout mixtures were under suspicion, including sprouts of beans, broccoli, peas, chickpeas, garlic, lentils, mung beans and radishes. The sprouts are often used in mixed salads.

The suspect farm’s produce — including herbs, fruits, flowers and potatoes — was impounded. At least one of the farm’s employees was also infected with the E. coli bacteria, Mr. Lindemann said.

Some experts in food-borne illnesses expressed surprise at Mr. Lindemann’s announcement, not because sprouts were an unlikely source of the deadly bacteria but for the opposite reason: sprouts have long been associated with food-borne illness and are a food most commonly suspected in this sort of outbreak. As such, the experts said, sprouts should have been among the first foods scrutinized by investigators.

Dr. Tauxe, who has talked to European officials during the investigation, though not on Sunday, said sprouts were included in a questionnaire that German investigators had used to interview victims of the outbreak to determine what they had eaten. He said that the officials in charge of the investigation had been aware of the common link between sprouts and food-borne illness.

“It’s not something they’re likely to have missed,” Dr. Tauxe said.

American experts said that investigators of any such outbreak in the United States would have been sure to have examined the possibility that sprouts might have been the cause.

“This is one of the things that everybody in our local health departments knows, that if you hear about one person eating sprouts you’re supposed to ring the alarm bell,” said William E. Keene, a senior epidemiologist of the Oregon Public Health Division, who has investigated many outbreaks involving sprouts. “A single case in a salmonella or E. coli O157 outbreak is a red flag,” he said, referring to the most common E. coli bacteria.

Since 1996, sprouts have been linked to at least 30 illness outbreaks, according to a United States federal food safety Web site that warns that children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with weak immune systems should not eat uncooked sprouts.

Sprouts were found to be the cause of one of the most severe series of outbreaks of E. coli ever identified, in Japan in 1996. In those outbreaks about 10,000 people, many of them children, fell ill after eating food containing uncooked radish sprouts. That involved the common O157:H7 strain of E. coli. The current outbreak in Germany involves a rare strain known as O104:H4.

Bacteria can flourish in the warm, humid conditions in which sprouts are grown, according to a report by the Centers for Disease Control. Investigators have sometimes found that the seeds used to grow sprouts are contaminated with bad bacteria, like E. coli or salmonella. Once those seeds start growing, the bacteria can easily spread.

“If you’re concerned about your risk of food-borne illness, don’t eat sprouts,” Dr. Keene said. “They’re essentially a dangerous kind of food.”

The Spanish government did not comment Sunday on the latest news in the German investigation. But mounting evidence that the problem should never have been linked to produce from Spanish farms is likely to raise pressure on Germany and the European Union to compensate Spanish farmers for estimated weekly losses of $286 million in revenue because of canceled shipments, as well as massive job cuts among seasonal growers in Andalusia.

That area, the Spanish agricultural heartland, was already suffering the worst unemployment problem in the country.

Judy Dempsey reported from Berlin, and William Neuman from New York. Raphael Minder contributed reporting from Madrid.

View the original article here

Last Hope for German Liberals? A Vietnamese-Born Doctor

 

ROSTOCK, GERMANY — A young Vietnamese-born physician has become the German liberals’ last hope for defending their standing in the government and preparing for the next federal elections, set to take place in 2013.

The politician, Philipp R?sler, 38, who was elected leader of the Free Democrats last week with overwhelming support, promised a new beginning during a packed party congress in Rostock during the weekend, a rallying cry for a party that has plummeted in opinion polls ever since joining Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition 18 months ago.

“From today, the F.D.P. will deliver,” he told delegates Saturday, trying to salve wounds suffered during recent defeats in regional elections.

Mr. R?sler also became economy minister when he assumed the party leadership from Guido Westerwelle, who will remain in the government as foreign minister but gave up all Free Democrat duties.

But if Mr. R?sler wants to sharpen the profile of the party, he is likely to run into conflict with the conservative bloc of Mrs. Merkel. And while a stronger and more popular Free Democratic Party would undoubtedly help the government in the opinion polls, it could also create a more fractious coalition.

During his speech, Mr. R?sler promised that the party would defend what had always been the heart of its philosophy: civil rights. This is bound to lead to conflicts with the Christian Social Union, the sister party of Mrs. Merkel’s Christian Democrats.

Since taking office three months ago, Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, a Christian Socialist, has called for tighter controls over the Internet and more powers for security services to prevent terrorist attacks and combat crime.

While the Free Democrats had always raised some opposition to such controls, those objections were often less than forceful under Mr. Westerwelle.

On his watch, the party became so focused on a single issue — tax cuts — that when he failed to persuade the Christian Democrats to go along with an overhaul of the tax system, he lost significant support.

When it became clear that Mr. R?sler, who until last week held the post of health minister, would assume the party leadership, he reassigned the Free Democrats’ top jobs, giving himself the far more popular job of economics minister.

Mr. R?sler made it clear that the party would still fight for tax reform. “We are willing to do it,” he told the congress on Saturday. “We are just waiting for our coalition partners.”

But in a major policy change, he also said the Free Democrats would support Finance Minister Wolfgang Sch?uble’s goal of cutting the budget deficit.

And in another sign that Mr. Sch?uble will find a more willing ally in Mr. R?sler, the new party leader quashed attempts by a group of euro-skeptic Free Democratic federal lawmakers to oppose an economic rescue package from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund.

On Monday and Tuesday, E.U. finance ministers are expected to approve a €78 billion, or $110 billion, bailout for Portugal. And in September, the German Parliament must vote on the final €700 billion package for debt-ridden countries in the bloc.

Mr. R?sler said the party had to reach out to “normal people,” phrasing that analysts said was an attempt to shed the Free Democrats’ image as a well-to-do movement detached from social problems.

Indeed, Mr. R?sler, a father of 2-year-old twins, spoke about single working parents struggling to find all-day child-care centers or schools, and families struggling to meet the costs of looking after their aging parents.

Mr. R?sler lived in a Roman Catholic orphanage in Saigon until being adopted by a German couple when he was 9 months old.

He has said in interviews that he had a normal German upbringing, growing up with his father, a career soldier, when his adoptive parents separated. He studied medicine and worked full time as an army doctor until 2003.

He also rose steadily through the ranks of the Free Democratic Party, which he joined when he was 19.

 

German Terrorism Arrests Disrupt Qaeda Inquiry

 

The moment came after they overheard a conversation in which the men exulted about the bombing in Morocco on Thursday that killed 16 people. The suspects had begun building a bomb; one of them complained about the smell as they mixed chemicals in a kitchen. They also mused about where they might kill the most people, officials said. A crowded bus stop, perhaps?

At that point, the investigators reluctantly decided that the danger of an attack outweighed the risk that arresting the men would alert other suspects and hamper the broader investigation. Shortly after sunrise on Friday, they seized two suspects in Düsseldorf, catching one as he walked to his car and another in his apartment, where the suspect briefly brandished a knife before surrendering.

A third man was arrested in Bochum, where he offered no resistance, German officials said on Saturday.

“It was completely clear to me we had to act,” said J?rg Ziercke, president of the Federal Criminal Police Office.

Mr. Ziercke and other officials laid out details of the investigation on Saturday, in a news conference near the federal court where the three men were brought before a judge.

The officials described a vast operation involving an intensive surveillance effort by more than 100 people and including assistance from American intelligence sources and the Moroccan authorities.

The German officials said they believed that the aborted attack was part of a strategy that Al Qaeda had been following to encourage homegrown terrorist attacks, now that the group had lost much of its ability to direct attacks from abroad.

Mr. Ziercke described the plot as a kind of hybrid terrorism that had elements of central control but left would-be attackers largely to their own devices.

One of the suspects, a citizen of Morocco who had lived for a decade in Germany, was recruited to attend a Qaeda training camp last year near the Afghan-Pakistani border, officials said. The suspect, identified only as Abdeladim El-K., 29, received weapons and explosives training and orders from a high-ranking Qaeda official, whom the authorities did not identify, to carry out an attack in Germany.

After re-entering Germany illegally in May 2010, Mr. Ziercke and other officials said, the suspect recruited two longtime acquaintances: men identified as Jamil S., 31, who has joint German and Moroccan citizenship; and Amid C., 19, who is a citizen of Germany and Iran.

While two of the suspects had Moroccan roots, the authorities said they had not found any evidence of a direct connection between the German plot and the bombing in Marrakesh. However, the men did appear to have been inspired by the attack, the police said.

The authorities said all three of the suspects worked full time on preparing for an attack, trying to conceal their activities by communicating in code and acquiring chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide and acetone that can be used in bomb production. They downloaded bomb-making recipes from the Internet and tried to extract chemicals for a detonator from a charcoal lighter.

The suspects also investigated security measures at possible targets like public buildings, airports and train stations, the authorities said. They stayed away from mosques and other places where they might attract attention.

The German officials who spoke on Saturday did not confirm news reports that the suspects planned to stage an attack during the Eurovision Song Contest, an international music competition that will draw large crowds to Düsseldorf from May 10 to 14.

While taking note of the event, officials said the suspects had not yet settled on a target.

“They wanted to create an explosion in a place with big crowds of people,” said Rainer Griesbaum, head of the antiterrorism unit at the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe.

Mr. Griesbaum and Mr. Ziercke said there was at least one other suspect tied to the plot who had not been arrested, and that there might be dozens of others in Germany providing financial and logistical support to terrorist groups. The officials said they knew of about 200 Germans who had received training at Qaeda camps.

Mr. Griesbaum said Al Qaeda remained determined to retaliate against Germany for sending troops to Afghanistan.

“We have prevented this danger, but only this danger,” Mr. Griesbaum said.