Review of EU food alerts to follow E. coli confusion

EU has to ‘learn lessons’ from botched handling of E. coli outbreak.

The European Union’s procedures for handling food-safety alerts are to be reviewed in the wake of Germany’s botched handling of an outbreak of E. coli.

Lessons would be learnt, said John Dalli, the European commissioner for health and consumer policy, once the crisis was over. “We should look at our systems and see what changes could be made,” he said, adding that it was not the time for recriminations.

But his remarks to MEPs in Strasbourg amounted to thinly veiled criticism of Germany.

“It is crucial that national authorities do not rush to give information on the source of infection that is not proven by bacteriological analysis,” he said, adding: “This spreads unjustified fears [among] the population all over Europe and creates problems for our food producers.”

Speaking after an emergency meeting of the EU’s farm ministers in Luxembourg on Tuesday (7 June), Dalli said that member states should transmit information via the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) only when they were “confident of the scientific evidence supporting identification” of the source of contamination.

The first cases of the fatal infection were reported on 2 May. On 26 May, Hamburg’s health minister announced that Spanish cucumbers were responsible for the outbreak of the shiga toxin-producing E. coli. This information was relayed to other EU member states using the RASFF network. On 1 June, the German health authorities announced that Spanish cucumbers had tested negative for the fatal strain of E. coli, even though traces of another strain of E. coli were found.

Last Sunday (5 June), the German authorities announced that bean sprouts grown on a farm near Hamburg were suspected, but test results released the next day did not confirm the presence of the lethal strain, which has caused 26 deaths.

In the meantime, sales of cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuces plummeted, and Russia imposed an import ban. According to COPA, a European farmers’ association, losses by EU producers and co-operatives in eight member states have reached €400 million a week. In some regions of the EU, all cucumbers produced last week were destroyed, while 80% of total vegetable production was destroyed because there was no outlet on the market.

Yesterday (8 June), Dacian Ciolos?, the European commissioner for agriculture, announced a €210m compensation package for farmers who have suffered losses as a result of the slump in sales of fruit and vegetables. Farmers will receive around 50% of the market value of their produce. The Spanish and French farm ministers criticised the compensation as too low. Rosa Aguilar, the Spanish agriculture minister, said that farmers should be compensated for 100% of losses.

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Sabine Laruelle, Belgium’s agriculture minister, said after the farm ministers’ meeting: “What I am asking is that, after the crisis, we examine the system of food-safety controls so we can react collectively more quickly and more effectively.” Laruelle said it was important to draw conclusions from the crisis about communications policy.

Peter Liese, a German centre-right MEP, said: “You can compensate for economic damage but not human lives. That is why it is fundamentally right to issue one warning too many rather than one too few.” “Crisis management in Germany isn’t always perfect,” he said, saying Germany’s federal structure made it difficult.

But Dagmar Roth-Behrendt, a German Socialist MEP and a public-health expert, said: “The federal government is out of its depth and is drowning in communication chaos.”

Alberto Alemanno, a professor of law at the École des Hautes Études Commerciales in Paris who edits the European Journal of Risk Regulation, said that the crisis could have been handled better if the European Commission had taken charge. He said that the Commission had the power to take over the task of assessing and communicating food-contamination risks. Risk assessments carried out by laboratories across the EU could have been centralised by a crisis unit and the public could have been given a “more balanced and cautious message” about possible sources of the outbreak, he said.