Some E.Coli infection among Irish people travelling to Germany is inevitable because of the outbreak there, a senior microbiologist here has said.
The outbreak claimed its 17th victim yesterday as scientists identified the strain of bacterium behind the contamination as “super-toxic” and resistant to antibiotics.
Dr Eleanor McNamara, director of the HSE's public health laboratory said that because all the cases discovered so far had had been related to travel to Germany, it was probably inevitable at some stage that some cases would be seen in Ireland.
Germany has suffered 16 of the 17 reported deaths so far in the outbreak and the vast majority of the more than 1,700 cases of illness.
The country's Robert Koch Institute disease control centre today reported199 new cases in the last two days.
Dr McNamara told RTÉ's Morning Ireland that while the source of the bacterium had not yet been confirmed, the situation was being monitored on a daily basis. German authorities suspected that it was food-related, she said.
She urged scrupulous hygiene practices when preparing food, and said air passengers should use antibacterial hand wipes before and after eating and using the bathroom.
Dr McNamara confirmed the E.Coli strain is “so virulent” that it may be contracted from human-to-human contact.
The symptoms are mild diarrhoea, followed by bloody diarrhoea, then kidney failure and bleeding disorders. With proper medical treatment, the vast majority of people will recover, Dr McNamara said.
Speaking on the same programme, Minister for Agriculture Simon Coveney sought to reassure the public that food here is safe. “If we thought there was any threat from imported products, we would act on that," he said. "But there is no evidence that exported food has caused the strain.”
It was an infection that was sourced in a particular area of Germany, he said.
Reports today suggest the outbreak has spread to the US with the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention saying it appeared three adults had developed symptoms of the illness after visiting northern Germany.
Though identified, the precise source of food chain contamination remains unclear. Russia imposed a blanket ban on all vegetable imports from the EU, prompting an official protest from Brussels. Scientists disagreed yesterday on whether the bacterium that has infected about 1,600 people, 470 of them seriously, is a new mutation or a known, rare variety.
German and Chinese researchers said yesterday that close analysis suggested it was “a new type of E.coli strain”. The World Health Organisation (WHO) called it a “very rare form of the bacteria never seen in an outbreak before”.
However, last night the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control said “serotype STEC 0104 has caused food-borne outbreaks of diarrhoea and haemolytic uraemic syndrome, or isolated cases, before.”
An online report on the centre's journal Eurosurveillance refers to a 1994 outbreak in Montana and a single case in the Far East in 2006. The H4 variant of E.coli 0104 was identified as the cause in the 2006 case and is the variant currently identified from samples analysed in laboratories in Germany.
Commenting on the relative lack of children affected in the current outbreak, Eurosurveillance notes: “The age and sex distribution of this outbreak is highly unusual, the cases who died were between 22 and 91 years of age.” Two-thirds of those affected are women.
Consumers and visitors to Germany are being urged to avoid salads, to boil all vegetables before eating and to regularly wash their hands.
German authorities believe the epicentre of the outbreak is Hamburg, though they are still in the dark about the outbreak’s exact source after ruling out earlier suspicions about Spanish cucumbers. Those suspicions prompted a mass recall of Spanish vegetables across the Continent, causing huge losses for Spanish farmers and considerable political upset in Madrid.
Yesterday farmers dumped unsold vegetables on the doorstep of the German consulate in Valencia.
“To simply return to politics as usual after the mistakes made by the German authorities would be unfair,” said Spanish prime minister José Luís Rodriguez Zapatero. He has vowed to “seek reparations from the relevant authorities in Europe for the harm” Spanish vegetable producers estimate at €200 million a week in total.
US health officials have not confirmed that the infections match the German strain, but Dr Robert Tauxe of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said it was very likely they are part of the same outbreak and more tests are being done to see if the infections have the same fingerprint.
The Pentagon has been notified about the outbreak because of the presence of US military bases in Germany but added that there are no known cases among US military personnel.
The European Commission attacked the Russian ban as “disproportionate” in a hugely important market worth €600 million annually – about a quarter of total EU vegetable exports.
Ireland’s vegetable trade with Russia, which saw €4 million worth of last year’s bumper crop of potatoes exported there, will not be hit by the Russian ban as the last consignments went last month. Late last year for the first time, Ireland supplied potatoes to the Russian market as its crop was devastated by drought. No other vegetable crops are exported to Russia from Ireland.