BERLIN: Germany blamed vegetable sprouts for a bacteria outbreak that has killed at least 33, left some 3,000 ill and cost farmers across Europe hundreds of millions of euros in lost sales.
After a weeks-long hunt for the elusive source of the contamination, German officials said they were confident they had found the origin.
"It's the sprouts," Reinhard Burger, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, the national disease centre, told a news conference on the outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) in northern Germany.
"People who ate sprouts were found to be nine times more likely to have bloody diarrhoea or other signs of EHEC infection than those who did not," he said, citing a study of more than 100 people who fell ill after dining...