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.

At the height of the scare, only 25% of the cucumbers for sale in some EU markets were sold, at just a quarter of the usual price.

Spain today, it could be Ireland tomorrow, falsely blamed for a food scare.

A Hamburg laboratory apparently misdiagnosed the genetic signature of the outbreak, leading to a wrongful alert on Spanish cucumbers — although German ministers have pointed out that official communications did not refer to any source of infection in Spain. In hindsight, surely experts should have known that if the source of the problem was a farm or farms in Spain, the infected produce would have gone to multiple outlets across Europe, and there would be many centres of disease outbreak. All cases except two were in people who recently visited northern Germany or, in one case, had contact with a visitor from there.

Suspect number two, organic bean sprouts, have previously caused E coli outbreaks around the world, and have been associated in the past with a type of E coli that causes the life-threatening hemolytic uremic syndrome at the centre of this outbreak.

Yet, cucumbers were blamed.

Another clue was that most of those infected were women aged between 20 and 50, a group not usually hard hit by E coli outbreaks from other sources, which tend to harm children and old people — but a group that tends to eat raw bean sprouts, believing them to be healthy.

Some are blaming the source misdiagnosis on a tendency among irate Germans to lash out and blame their fellow Europeans when something bad happens.

But that is unlikely, given that Germany had another large internal food scare as recently as January, when 4,700 poultry and pig farms were shut after feed additives at plant in northern Germany were found to have 77 times the permitted levels of dioxin.

Whoever’s to blame for the mess, Europe will simply have to try harder in future to minimise food scares.

Special attention must be paid in production of meat, where about 21% of incidents arise, processed foods (12%), and fruit and vegetables (11%).

Looking at food recalls indicates where vigilance must be tightened. Operational mistakes, such as incorrect labelling, the presence of an undeclared ingredient, or contamination during the production process, cause 56% of recalls. Biological causes, such as the detection of listeria, salmonella and E coli (the latest problem) are factors, but even more important were food fraud and corruption among suppliers.

Nor can there can be any cutting back on common agricultural policy expenditure on food sanitary controls.

And there must be no more jumping the gun like what happened in Germany, which adds hugely to food safety costs, because falsely accused Spanish farmers will have to be compensated, either from EU funds or as national state aid.

The EU is no worse than other trading blocs for food scares, and in the past had a better record than the US or Australia, according to publicly available data on food product recalls.

But there can be no let-up in the task of keeping food safe. That includes education of consumers. Perhaps cooking or better washing of food could have prevented the recent deaths.

Perhaps consumers need to be more careful with washed and ready-to-eat type raw products, which obviously carry a higher risk — obvious at least to anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of microbiology.

Perhaps the EU also will have to get more methodical and less political about food traceability. At present, the place of origin of a foodstuff must be given only if its absence might mislead the consumer. Specific country of origin labelling is only required for beef, unprocessed poultry, and fruit and vegetables.

For the purposes of international trade, origin is deemed to be the place where the product last underwent a “substantial transformation”.

There are moves towards mandatory country of origin/place of provenance labelling, and the extension of this to other meats.

It could all help in controlling the next food scare, and correctly identifying the source.