Bean sprouts confirmed as source of E coli outbreak

GERMAN bean sprouts caused the E coli outbreak that has killed 31 people and sickened more than 3,000, investigators announced after tracking 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 centre, 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 press conference with the heads of Germany’s Federal Institute for Risk Assessment and its Federal Office for Consumer Protection. “It is the sprouts.”