# 5610
You could almost see this coming.
After a 24-hour news cycle with the media all-but indicting an organic sprout farm in Germany for the deaths of 22 individuals – we’ve news this morning indicating that the initial tests from that farm have been negative for E. Coli.
Reuters and Deutsche Presse-Agentur are both reporting that of 40 samples taken from the farm, 23 have reportedly come back clean, while the results of the others are still awaited.
Sky News is reporting these findings this way:
German Tests Reveal Sprouts Not E.coli Source
Monday, 6th June 2011 04:00
Initial test results reveal that bean sprouts from an organic farm in Germany are not the source of an E.coli outbreak which has so far killed 22 people.
Preliminary examinations had found that bean sprouts from a farm in the Uelzen area, between the northern cities of Hamburg and Hannover, could be traced to infections in five German states.
A wider test will now be carried out on a sample of older sprouts and packaging.
Which isn’t quite the same thing as full exoneration, but it is hardly the smoking sprout that the news media had been expecting.
Of course, we’ll have to await further testing before we can know if this organic farm can be completely eliminated as the source of the E. Coli outbreak across Europe.
But as I wrote yesterday in ECDC EHEC Update & Collateral Damage:
. . . a new `prime suspect’ in this outbreak seems to emerge on practically a daily basis. While these theories make for good newspaper fodder, they can also unfairly malign and trample the innocent.
If this organic farm is eventually eliminated from the suspect column - the list of collateral damage from this outbreak will have incremented once more - and the investigators will find themselves tasked with looking for another source.
Stay tuned.
