An employee of the microbiology and toxicology department at the chemical and veterinary examination office Stuttgart runs tests on bean sprouts in the southern German town of Fellbach on June 7, 2011.
After first sending Spain's agricultural industry into a tailspin by falsely accusing that country's cucumbers, German authorities on June 5 pointed a finger of blame at local beansprouts — specifically the produce of an organic farm in the village of Bienenbüttel, around 70 kilometers south of Hamburg — as the source of an outbreak of deadly E. Coli infections. But the next day, the Ministry of Agriculture of Lower Saxony, which includes Bienenbüttel, declared that 23 of 40 samples taken from the farm had tested negative for the virulent strain of enterohemorrhagic strain E. Coli (technically EHEC O104:H4) that has caused 21 deaths so far. So is the farm off the hook?
Not quite, if only because the farm continues to be prominent in the investigation's attempt to re-trace the supply chain that led to the infections. "We can't give beansprouts the all-clear just yet," says Reinhard Burger, President of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany's federal agency responsible for disease control. Gert Lindemann, the Agriculture Minister of Lower Saxony said deliveries of the farm's beansprouts had been linked (either directly or indirectly via distributors) to restaurants in his own state as well as Schleswig-Holstein and other regions where people had fallen ill. And, on the same day that the test results were announced, officials decided to take further samples of the bean sprout seeds from the farm — some of which were imported from Asia — for more in-depth analysis. A team of RKI inspectors is now on location at the farm.
One employee at the farm had also been infected with the EHEC bacteria. "There are many concrete links between the farm and restaurants and canteens across Germany where people became infected with the EHEC bacterium," Gert Hahne, spokesman for the ministry of agriculture in the state of Lower Saxony, told TIME. Food safety inspectors who visited the site over the weekend ploughed through the company's records of deliveries. "It's like Sherlock Holmes — solving the mystery of this bacterial outbreak is very challenging," says Hahne. "We need to look at different facts and investigate many different leads. It's a complex web. There's no clear line of inquiry."
But there appears to be a line connecting the farm to a restaurant where customers eventually took ill. Officials in the northern city of Lübeck say that 17 people became infected with EHEC at the Kartoffel-Keller ("Potato Cellar"). The restaurant received beansprouts from a distributor who ordered the sprouts from the organic farm in Bienenbüttel. The restaurant's employees tested negative for the bacterium on Monday. Sprouts from Bienenbüttel via the same distributor were also traced to the golf hotel and golf club at Schloss Lüdersburg, 70 kilometres south of Hamburg, where, according to Hahne, 11 Swedish tourists became infected with EHEC after eating the vegetables.
The German authorities suspect the EHEC bacterium entered the water in a barrel used to grow the beansprouts. The temperature of the steam — 38 degrees Celsius — used to germinate the sprouts is also regarded as ideal for bacteria to flourish. Officials say the bacteria could also have come from batches of seeds, some of which were imported from abroad — including Asia. Other outbreaks of E. Coli have been linked to sprouts in Asia. in 1996, 17 people died in Japan after eating radish sprouts. However, the Chinese genomics institute that first identified the strain currently causing havoc released a new report that suggests it derives from a 2001 German strain. The Beijing Genomic Insitute put out a bulletin requesting any laboratory with samples of that historic strain to share it with other scientists in order to better understand how it may have developed into the Ehec bacterium now at work.
Though it has been shut down, the farm in Bienenbüttel is putting up a fight. With reporters from all over the world camping outside his farm, Klaus Verbeck the managing director of Gaertnerhof Bienenbüttel, told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung, a regional newspaper, that no fertilisers are used to produce beansprouts and there are no animals on his farm. E. Coli contamination is believed to enter the food supply via animal manure. "I can't understand how the processes we have here and the accusations could possibly fit together," Verbeck told the paper. "The sprouts are grown from seeds and water, and they aren't fertilised at all. There aren't any animal fertilisers used in other areas on the farm either."
The agriculture ministry in Lower Saxony would not release the name of the distributor involved but German media has carried reports that a company in the city of Mölln called Fruchthof Mölln allegedly delivered the sprouts to the Lübeck eatery and other restaurants. The director of the company, Johanna Tramm, told the DPA news agency on Monday that "we have recalled the beansprouts and we are waiting for the results of lab tests."
Under fire for its chaotic handling of the crisis, Chancellor Angela Merkel's government has set up a special task force to deal with the EHEC outbreak and the government is holding a summit on June 8 in Berlin that will bring together the various ministries, representatives of Germany's federal states and experts. Meanwhile, RKI scientists and experts across the country are working round the clock to try to locate the source of the infection — with raw vegetables still the main suspect. There is some good news. RKI President Burger says that on June 7, for the first time, there was a downward trend in the number of EHEC cases. "We hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel," he says. "Either consumers have heeded the warning and aren't eating raw vegetables, or the contaminated food as the source of infection has disappeared." But then, so would all the best clues to how the contamination occured in the first place. With reporting by Hannah Beech/Beijing