Another day, another twist in the ongoing deadly E. coli outbreak across Europe: first, everyone blamed Spain and their dirty cucumbers, but then, it looked like German bean sprouts were going to be culprit. Until today, when the test results came back and cleared the bean sprouts from wrongdoing.
In what's being described as "a surprising U-turn," German officials said the preliminary tests they ran on 23 of 40 samples of sprouts from Lower Saxony, which had been distributed to several restaurants where diners fell ill, provided no evidence of contamination. (The remaining 17 samples are currently being tested.) Officials cautioned that just because the results were negative on these sprouts, it doesn't mean that previous sprouts weren't contaminated, highlighting the difficulties in pinpointing an outbreak that's already several weeks old.
The continuing failure to lock down the source of the deadly bacteria has some American scientists riled: "All this wishy-washy back-and-forth, it's just incompetence," said Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. "Where's the epidemiology?" he asked. The FDA has yet to issue an update reflecting the sprout findings, though experts say that the U.S. risk of an E. coli outbreak remains low.
To really get in to the heart of matters, peruse this lay-'em-bare Slate article about the bacteria entitled "We Eat Crap. It Makes Us Sick."
