Jumping to conclusions costly

A US outbreak of salmonella in 2008 led to a public warning against consuming raw tomatoes. It took three months for the authorities to declare peppers were the real threat.

In the meantime, more than 1,000 fell ill, and the tomato industry suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in lost sales.

This time Spanish cucumber growers are the fall guys, losing €200m a week, after being wrongly blamed for an unprecedented food poisoning outbreak centred in northern Germany, which had caused 22 deaths up to this week. The loss of sales put 70,000 out of work in Spain, which already had the highest unemployment in the EU.