New e coli outbreak' source is frozen beef from Germany
Health authorities in France have ordered a recall of beefburgers sold by the supermarket chain Lidl after seven children became infected and hospitalized with E coli bacteria.
Officials ruled out a link between those infections and the deadly outbreak sighted on Germany and followed in Sweden that has killed 39 people in the recent months.
Daniel Lenoir, head of the health agency in the region, stated: “We are certain it’s not the same bacterial strain that was discovered on sprouts in Germany.”
On Wednesday five children, aged between 20 months and eight years and from different towns in the Nord Pas de Calais region, were taken to a hospital in the city of Lille after suffering bouts of bloody diarrhea.
One was quickly released, but four were still being treated at the hospital. Three are being treated with hemodialysis, a method of removing waste products from the blood in the case of kidney failure.
Three children were admitted to hospital on Thursday, the health official said.
One of the victims’ condition was life-threatening, a medical source told Reuters.
Lenoir said the seven children were in hospital with infections stemming from E coli bacteria, which causes vomiting and severe, often bloody, diarrhoea. He added that five of the children had eaten frozen ground beef patties that were produced in a French factory and sold by the German supermarket chain Lidl.
The e coli bacteria infected beef came from Germany and France
The beef for the burgers came from farms in France, Germany and the Netherlands, according to SEB, the French manufacturer that supplied the meat to the supermarket chain.
The recall affected about 10 tonnes of meat, said Guy Lamorlette, chief executive of SEB, who added that the burgers had been analysed before being delivered to supermarket distributors.
The family of one of the children in hospital took a box of the burgers to health authorities for analysis, according to Jerome Gresland, co-director of Lidl France. All the meat supplied by SEB had been removed from the supermarket chain’s shelves.
France Health Minister Xavier Bertrand said a search was underway to determine the origin of the outbreak and stricter controls would be enforced at production sites.
“I hope we can launch a search program very quickly, we are working on that already with French researchers in order to identify (the origin) and deal with health problems soon,” he informed.
A spokesman for Lidl said that beef used in the suspect boxes had been bought from French supplier SEB-CERF, based in the northeastern town of Saint-Dizier, which produces some 400 tonnes per week of frozen beef, according to its website.
“The products were made in France, but depending on the expiry date and our suppliers’ opportunities, the beef can come from Germany, Italy, France, the Netherlands or even other places,” spokesman Jerome Gresland at Lidl told Reuters.
“We buy the beef through this supplier with a stamp that says it comes from the European Union.”
A box of suspected beef patties found at the home of an infected child was labelled as containing beef that came from Germany, the supplier’s chief executive told Reuters.
But, he added, that container was not enough to determine the origin of the infection with any certainty because many other boxes of suspected product contained beef produced in other locations around Europe.
The e coli outbreak in France is not as serious as the one in Germany
Frédéric Vincent, spokesman for the European commission, said the outbreak in France was not as serious as the one in Germany. He said the strain found in France was “discovered regularly”. There were 3,500 cases of E coli in the EU last year, he said, 93 of which were in France.
Vincent said the commission was waiting for more information, keen to avoid a repeat of the situation when Spanish cucumbers were wrongly blamed for the German E coli outbreak, costing Spanish farmers significant income.
The E coli outbreak in Germany was traced last week to sprouts from a farm in the north of the country. There have been more than 3,000 infections reported so far but German health officials said the number of new infections was tailing off. They advised consumers not to eat any vegetable sprouts, as they still needed to determine how the bacteria reached the farm.
