ALARM bells were ringing yesterday, as Nigerians continued to import killer vegetables from Europe.
At the last count yesterday, 17 people had died, and 1,200 hospitalised, in at least eight European countries, after eating contaminated cucumbers, one of the imported ingredients Nigerians use in making salad.
The Nigerian Compass investigations showed that Nigerians have been importing cucumbers from several European countries, including Spain where health authorities say the vegetable has been infected with a killer bacterial known as enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) or E. coli.
The bacterial causes kidney failure, sometimes causing seizures and strokes.
Spain, Netherlands, Mexico, Canada, Jordan, Turkey, United States (U.S.), Iran and Greece are major cucumber exporters to Nigeria, Mozambique, Angola, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Gabon and Saint Helena.
Two victims died in Germany yesterday, and the authorities have identified cucumbers from Spain as contamination sources.
Also suspect-batch from either the Netherlands or Denmark is under investigation.
Germany imports about 182,000 tonnes of cucumbers a year from Spain, accounting for 40 per cent of its total cucumber imports, according to German figures from 2008; the most recent available.
E. coli victims suffer haemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), a form of kidney failure that is being blamed on imported cucumbers traced to two Spanish farms.
But Nigerian authorities are feeling cool with the cucumber story.
The Chief Country Epidemiologist at the Federal Ministry of Health, Dr. Henry Akpan, allayed the fears of Nigerians over the cucumber bug yesterday. He urged them not to panic over the incidents.
In a telephone interview with the Nigerian Compass, Akpan said there must be something that had contaminated the cucumber in countries where it was infecting people.
Although statistics show that Nigeria imported three tonnes of cucumber from South Africa in 2009, and has been importing from European countries, Akpan denied such importation.
His words: “There is something either in the fertilisers that is used to grow those cucumbers, or in their environment that is contaminating their cucumbers. We do not have such a problem in Nigeria. Our people should not
panic. They should eat as much cucumber as they want.”
When asked what should be done to check cucumbers currently being imported into the country, Akpan insisted that the cucumbers consumed in Nigeria are cultivated in the country.
Most of the ongoing cases have been concentrated around the northern city of Hamburg, although cases of HUS have also been reported in Austria.
Till Backhaus, Consumer Affairs Minister, said three cucumber consignments were seized in supermarkets and restaurants. He declined to say what country they had been imported from.
The outbreak in northern Germany is costing farmers and retailers millions of Euros as mountains of raw vegetables sit uneaten, with no clarity on what caused the infections. The aggressive strain has now spread to seven other European countries.
Laboratory tests had not shown yet they were infected with E.coli.
‘We tracked down the cucumbers using questionnaires filled in by sick people and that’s why we think they are connected to this case,’ Backhaus said.
Apart from the samples, all the cucumbers in the consignments were destroyed as a precaution.
According to reports, nearly 400 people in Germany were battling the potentially fatal version of the infection that attacks the kidneys and kills up to 5 per cent of patients.
A U.S. expert said doctors had never seen so many cases of the condition, haemolytic uremic syndrome, tied to a food-borne outbreak.
The mystery deepened with new evidence that German vegetables may have been contaminated by at least two strains of E. coli.
Authorities in Hamburg said last week that they had detected EHEC on four cucumbers in a market in the northern German city, three imported from Spain and the fourth of unclear origin.
On Tuesday, however, officials said they had found a slightly different type of EHEC on the cucumbers than the strain detected in the faeces of sick people in Germany. That means those cucumbers did not cause the
outbreak but posed a health risk nonetheless, the German officials said.
Spain’s Agriculture Minister, Rosa Aguilar, seized on the find as evidence that “our cucumbers are not responsible for the situation”.
Officials at the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, which neighbours Hamburg and is one of the worst affected, said that tests on 141 samples of food including cucumbers, tomatoes, milk products, zucchini, and poultry had found no EHEC.
E. coli is found in large quantities in the digestive systems of mammals and has been responsible for a large number of food-contamination outbreaks in a variety of countries. In most cases, it causes nonlethal stomach ailments.
But EHEC causes more severe symptoms, ranging from bloody diarrhoea to the rare haemolytic uremic syndrome. In Germany, at least 373 people have come down with the syndrome, or HUS, in which E. coli infection
attacks the kidneys, sometimes causing seizures and strokes.
“The idea of an outbreak of over 300 haemolytic uremic syndrome cases is absolutely extraordinary,” said Robert Tauxe, deputy director of food-borne, waterborne and environmental diseases at the U.S. Centers for
Disease Control.
Spain exports most of its produce to other countries in Europe.
The vast majority of EHEC infections have affected either Germans or people who recently travelled to Germany. Germany’s health officials said 796 people in the country had been hit by less serious infection with the EHEC bacteria. They confirmed that northern city of Hamburg and surrounding areas have been worst affected.
Other cases have been reported in Denmark, France, the Czech Republic, the U.K., the Netherlands and Switzerland, but the World Health Organization said it only had confirmation of the German cases and another six cases in France.
There is frequently a lag between reports of disease outbreaks by national authorities and confirmation by the WHO.
German regional officials have said they were seeing a sharp drop in the number of new cases.
Officials in the north-western city of Paderborn said, however, that an 87-year-old who suffered from a variety of ailments including recent EHEC infection had died early Tuesday.
In Sweden, hospital medical chief, Jerker Isacson said that the Swedish woman who died had been ill for a few days before she arrived at the hospital on Sunday and died early Tuesday.
“She developed serious complications, among other things on the kidneys,” he said.
The Swedish Institute for Communicable Disease Control on Monday said 41 Swedes had been infected with EHEC so far, including 15 with HUS.
Britt Akerlind, spokeswoman at the institute, said it was unclear why so many Swedes had been infected, but said it could be that efficient reporting mechanism in the Nordic country meant more cases had been discovered there.
In the meantime, Russia’s chief sanitary agency on Monday banned the imports of cucumbers, tomatoes and fresh salad from Spain and Germany pending further notice.
It said that it might even ban the imports of fresh vegetables from all European Union member states due to the lack of information about the source of infection. Belgium and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) have also blocked the import of Spanish cucumber.