NONE OF the contaminated batch of Spanish cucumber involved in a serious health scare in Germany has been sold here, the Food Safety Authority of Ireland has said.
The authority said it, along with the Department of Agriculture and the Health Service Executive, had been contacting retailers, caterers and distributors in Ireland and there was “no information” to suggest that the cucumbers were on sale in Ireland.
It said it was liaising with the European Commission and would provide updates about the situation if necessary.
The HSE confirmed yesterday that there had been no reported cases here and the Health Protection Surveillance Centre was monitoring the situation.
The suspected death toll from Germany’s E.coli epidemic has risen to 10 as authorities struggle to identify the source of the outbreak now spreading across Europe.
Claims that contaminated Spanish cucumbers were the sole cause of illness have been dismissed by German health authorities, who admitted at the weekend that the epidemic had yet to peak.
More than 1,000 cases of infection with the EHEC (enterohaemorrhagic E.coli) bacteria have been reported in recent days in Germany, far above the 900 cases reported annually.
The Robert Koch institute for infectious diseases has confirmed two deaths related to the EHEC outbreak with eight further deaths with suspected links.
All cases so far have been in northern Germany; the most recent death was that of an 86- year-old woman from Lübeck.
Retail chains in Austria and the Czech Republic have taken Spanish-grown produce, including cucumbers, tomatoes and aubergines, off their shelves as a preventive measure.
Federal agriculture minister Ilse Aigner has urged Germans not to panic, but has warned against eating raw vegetables.
“As long as the experts in Germany and Spain have not been able to name the source of the agent without any doubt, the general warning for vegetables still holds,” she told the Bild am Sonntag.
At one clinic in Hamburg, 80 patients were being treated for EHEC infection. Of them, some four children and 14 adults are in a “critical condition” in intensive care. The EHEC bacterium is the source of the potentially fatal haemolytic uraemic syndrome, which attacks the human nervous system and can cause kidney failure. In 30 cases in Hamburg, the bacteria has halted kidney function, prompting doctors to try a new therapy using an antibody called Eculizumab.