Sprouts blamed in Europe’s E. coli outbreak

BERLIN — German vegetable sprouts caused the E. coli outbreak that has killed 31 people and sickened nearly 3,100, investigators announced Friday after tracking links to the bacteria from patients in hospital beds to restaurants and then farm fields.

Reinhard Burger, president of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s national disease control center, said the pattern of the outbreak had produced enough evidence to draw that conclusion even though no tests on sprouts from an organic farm in Lower Saxony had come back positive for the E. coli strain behind the outbreak.

“In this way, it was possible to narrow down epidemiologically the cause of the outbreak of the illness to the consumption of sprouts,” Burger told reporters at a news conference with the heads of Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment and its Federal Office for Consumer Protection. “It is the sprouts.”

The breakthrough came after an expert team from the three institutes linked separate clusters of patients who had fallen sick to 26 restaurants and cafeterias that had received produce from the organic farm.

“It was like a crime thriller where you have to find the bad guy,” said Helmut Tschiersky-Schoeneburg of the consumer protection agency.

“They even studied the menus, the ingredients, looked at bills and took pictures of the different meals, which they then showed to those who had fallen ill,” said Andreas Hensel, head of the agency.

Burger said all the tainted sprouts may have been consumed or thrown away by now.