Gert Lindemann, agriculture minister in the Northern State of Lower Saxony, said in Hanover that Germans should not eat sprouts until further notice, with the final test results available Monday. Mr. Lindemann said the authorities could not yet rule out other possible sources of the outbreak and called on Germans to continue to avoid tomatoes, cucumbers, and lettuce.
The suggestion that sprouts can be the cause of the outbreak, one of the most disastrous food-borne diseases in the year was met with caution by public health experts.
"We want either epidemiological evidence, or laboratory confirmed evidence," said Dr. Robert Tauxe, Deputy Director of food-borne diseases for control centres and prevention in Atlanta.
The German authorities had acted prematurely once before in its investigation, blaming cucumbers grown in Spain for outbreak after preliminary tests showed that they may have contained toxic e. coli bacteria. Further tests showed that the Spanish cucumbers contained the strain that makes people sick and then scrapped the investigators.
This episode furious Spanish farmers who lost millions of dollars in sales and was forced to abandon the ripe vegetables to rot in fields which demand collapsed.
The outbreak in Germany, health authorities reported only at the end of may, is caused by an unusual strain of toxic e. coli that can cause bloody diarrhea. In extreme cases can cause acute renal failure and death. Previous outbreaks of other strains of e. coli, appeared renal failure usually among children. Most of the victims with renal failure have been adults in this outbreak, and more than two-thirds have been women.
The eruption showed no signs of abating on Sunday, with the German National Institute reports that the death toll has risen by 22 and 2 153 people were sick, more than 600 of them in intensive care.
Mr. Lindemann said the locally-cultivated bean bulkhead was the "most compelling" reason, and that the farm that grew in the area had been closed, Uelzen But he said 18 sprout mixtures was suspected, including germ of beans, broccoli, peas, chickpeas, garlic, lentils, mung beans and radishes. Germs are often used in mixed salads.
The suspected farm products — including herbs, fruits, flowers and potatoes — were in custody. At least one of the farm's employees were also infected with e. coli-bacteria, said Mr. Lindemann.
Some experts in food-borne diseases, expressed surprise at Mr. Lindemann notice, not because the shot was an unlikely source of the deadly bacteria, but due to the opposite: the germ has long been associated with food-borne diseases and is a food which usually suspected when this type of outbreak. As such, experts said, sprouts should have been among the first food to be examined by investigators.
Dr. Tauxe, who has spoken with European officials during the investigation, but not on Sunday, said germ was part of a survey that German investigators had been used to interview victims of the outbreak to determine what they had eaten. He said that officials responsible for the investigation had been aware of the common link between germ and food-borne diseases.
"There is something they are likely to have missed," said Dr. Tauxe.
American experts said the investigators about any such outbreak in the United States would have been sure to have examined the possibility of germ may have been the cause.
-This is one of the things that all of our local departments know that if you hear about a person eat sprouts are you supposed to make wake-up call, says William e. Keene, a senior epidemiologist of the Oregon Public Health Division, which has examined several outbreaks in sprouts. -A single case of salmonella or e. coli O157 outbreak is a red flag, he said, referring to the most commonly used e. coli-bacteria.
Since 1996, sprouts have been linked to at least 30 disease outbreaks, according to a United States federal food safety Web site warns that children, the elderly, pregnant women and people with weak immune systems should not eat raw sprouts.
Germs were found to be the cause of one of the greatest number of outbreaks of e. coli ever identify in Japan in 1996. In these outbreaks around 10,000 people, many of them children, became ill after eating food containing raw Radish sprouts. Which involved the common O157: H7 strain of e. coli. The current outbreak in Germany means a rare strain called O104: H4.
Bacteria can thrive in warm, humid conditions that sprouts are grown, according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control. Investigators have sometimes found that the seeds used to grow cabbage is contaminated by bad bacteria, e. coli or salmonella. When these start to grow, bacteria can easily spread.
"If you are concerned about the risk of food-borne diseases can not eat sprouts," said Dr. Keene. "They are essentially a dangerous type of food."
The Spanish Government does not comment on Sunday the latest news in the German investigation. But mounting evidence that the problem should never be applied to products from Spanish farms is likely to increase pressure on Germany and the European Union to compensate Spanish farmers estimated weekly loss of 286 million dollars in revenue because of interrupted shipments, as well as massive job cuts among seasonal growers in Andalusia.
The area, the Spanish agricultural heartland, was already suffering worst unemployment in the country.
Judy Dempsey reported from Berlin and William Neuman from New York. Raphael Minors contributed reporting from Madrid.
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