No one seems to know which organic food has killed 22 people and sickened thousands due to E. coli bacterial contamination. A day after blaming German sprouts - not a bad guess, sprouts have been the cause of 30 food scares just in the US since 1996 - and a few days after blaming Spanish cucumbers, investigators are admitting they may never know.
It's probably wiser to just not shop in the organic supermarket for a while.
"We have to be clear on this: Maybe we won't be able anymore to identify the source," said Andreas Hensel, head of Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, a further sign that this outbreak of E. coli has done to organic food what the earthquake at Fukushima did to nuclear power plants.
"This investigation has been a disaster," Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told The Associated Press. "This kind of wishy-washy response is incompetent."
630 remain hospitalized with a rare, serious complication that can lead to kidney failure and this outbreak has hit women harder because wealthy, educated, healthy-lifestyle women in Europe have been educated that organically processed food is nutritionally superior, in defiance of the science.
