Cucumbers draw new attention in E. coli outbreak (AP)

BERLIN � Cucumbers were back on the radar of German health authorities Wednesday as the possible cause of an E. coli outbreak in Europe that has killed at least 26 people and sickened over 2,700 others.

Two weeks ago, investigators blamed cucumbers from Spain for the deadly outbreak and then later ruled them out as the source. Then, the focus shifted to sprouts from northern Germany, but none that were tested turned out to be contaminated with the bacteria strain blamed for the outbreak.

Now, suspicions have fallen on a cucumber of an unknown country origin that sickened a family in eastern Germany. The cucumber � the first food found to be contaminated with the strain that has sickened thousands � was in the family's compost, but there is no conclusive evidence that it's the source.

"It's unclear whether the cucumber infected the people, or the people the cucumber," said Holger Paech, the spokesman for Saxony Anhalt state's health ministry.

The father of the family had diarrhea, the mother was hospitalized for several days and their 22-year-old daughter is among about 700 people across Europe with a severe complication that can lead to kidney failure. She has been hospitalized for almost two weeks.

"The family was sick," Paech said. "So, they could have contaminated the cucumber instead of the other way round."

There has been no reported evidence of humans contaminating vegetables, but the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment maintained that "the finding does not allow any conclusions" because the cucumber had been lying in the compost between May 19 and May 30.

Laboratory tests on other samples taken from their house and from shops where they usually buy their vegetables all tested negative for the bacteria, he added.

Consumers across Europe are shunning fruit and vegetables, and the German warning against eating cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and sprouts is still in place. EU farmers claim losses up to euro417 million ($611 million) a week as ripe produce rots in fields and warehouses.

The EU therefore increased its offer of compensation to farmers for the E. coli outbreak to euro210 million ($306 million), EU Farm Commissioner Dacian Ciolos said. A final decision will be made next week by EU member states.

Outside health experts and German lawmakers have strongly criticized the investigation in Germany, saying the infections should have been spotted much sooner and having state-by-state probes was hurting the search for a cause.

After authorities in Hamburg state had blamed Spanish cucumbers, Lower Saxony turned on sprouts which officials there say "is still the best lead we have."

But more tests came back negative Wednesday on sprout samples from an organic farm in the northern town of Bienenbuettel but the farm is still considered a possible source for the outbreak. German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner said eight clusters of patients � more than 50 infected people � can now be tracked to that farm.

"That means even if we have no (positive) sprout test results yet, we have indications based on tracking nutrition the affected people eat," she said. "We are even looking for more cases that can be linked to the farm."

In Madrid, Spanish farmers handed out 40 tons of fruit and vegetables to draw attention to their plight. People lined up for 100 meters along dozens of tables to snap up a wide and colorful variety of produce, including cherry tomatoes, lettuce, peppers, cucumbers and watermelons.

In China, authorities ordered stepped-up health inspections for travelers arriving from Germany to prevent the super-toxic strain from reaching its shores.

Fear of the E. coli outbreak also spread to Britain, where the national rowing team announced its withdrawal from the World Rowing Cup due to take place in Hamburg � the outbreak's epicenter � over the weekend of June 17-19.

Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, reported 300 more E. coli cases Wednesday, raising the total to 2,648. Another 100 E. coli cases are in other European countries and the United States.

Despite the new infections, German Health Minister Daniel Bahr said the overall trend showed fewer new cases of illness, and expressed cautious optimism.

"I cannot yet give an all-clear, but after an analysis of the numbers there's reason for hope," Bahr told ARD television.

The European Union health chief John Dalli also held an emergency meeting with German officials on the E. coli crisis but avoided publicly criticizing their efforts, saying the cucumber warning was "justified" based on the data Hamburg authorities had at the time.

He urged European countries to "work together, cooperate and share expertise to address this outbreak and bring it to an end as soon as possible."

"This is not the time for criticism and recriminations, but the time to focus our efforts at all levels in order to get to grips on this crisis," he said.

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David Rising in Berlin, Daniel Woolls in Madrid, and Gillian Wong in Beijing contributed reporting.

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Experts: Time running out to solve E. coli mystery (AP)

LONDON � Health experts say time is running out for German investigators to find the source of the world's deadliest E. coli outbreak, and some have been surprised � even shocked � at lapses in the German investigation.

German health officials are still looking for the cause of the outbreak that began May 2. So far, the super-toxic strain of E. coli has killed 24 people, infected over 2,400 and left hundreds hospitalized with a serious complication that can lead to kidney failure. New cases are still being reported every day � 94 more in Germany on Tuesday.

"If we don't know the likely culprit in a week's time, we may never know the cause," Dr. Guenael Rodier, the director of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization, told The Associated Press in an interview Tuesday.

Experts say the outbreak could have been spotted sooner with better medical detection and immediate interviews with patients about what they ate.

German officials accused Spanish cucumbers of being the culprit last week but had to retract when the cucumbers had a different strain of E. coli. On Sunday, they blamed German sprouts, only to backtrack a day later when initial tests were negative.

Rodier said the contaminated vegetables have probably disappeared from the market and it would be difficult for German investigators to link patients to contaminated produce weeks after they first became infected.

Other experts were even more critical of the German investigation.

"If you gave us 200 cases and 5 days, we should be able to solve this outbreak," said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, whose team has contained numerous food-borne outbreaks in the United States.

Osterholm described the German effort as "erratic" and "a disaster" and said officials should have done more detailed patient interviews as soon as the epidemic began. He also disputed the idea it might be impossible to find the outbreak's source.

"To say we may never solve this is just an excuse for an ongoing bad investigation," he said. "This is like a cold murder case where you go back and re-examine the evidence."

Even German lawmakers have slammed the government's chaotic response to the outbreak, criticizing the confusing announcements and retractions.

Christine Clauss, Saxony's state health minister and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's own governing party, said states were initially conducting their own investigations into the outbreak.

"It would be especially important to cooperate more closely and in a more centralized way in situations with a nationwide germ," she told the daily newspaper Leipziger Volkszeitung.

Karl Lauterbach, a doctor who serves as the health expert for the opposition Social Democrats, has repeatedly urged the government to set up a national crisis team to counter the lack of coordination and the leadership vacuum among the federal and state authorities responding to the crisis.

Paul Hunter, a professor of health protection at the University of East Anglia in England, said German investigators could have picked up the outbreak sooner if doctors regularly did lab tests on patients with diarrhea � a standard practice in Britain.

"They could miss an outbreak starting until people get quite sick with severe complications," he said.

Hunter said German doctors probably only realized how big the outbreak was when the number of patients with kidney failure spiked in mid-May.

On Tuesday, the EU health chief warned Germany against issuing any more premature � and inaccurate � conclusions about the source of contaminated food. EU health chief John Dalli told the EU parliament in Strasbourg that information must be scientifically sound and foolproof before it becomes public.

"It is crucial that national authorities do not rush to give information on the source of infection that is not proven by bacteriological analysis, as this spreads unjustified fears (among) the population all over Europe and creates problems for our food producers," Dalli said.

Tests are continuing on sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany, but have so far come back negative. Rodier said that doesn't necessarily exonerate the vegetables.

"Just because tests are negative doesn't mean you can rule them out," he said. "The bacteria could have been in just one batch of contaminated food and by the time you collect specimens from the samples that are left, it could be gone."

Hunter said the outbreak could have devastating consequences for consumers' faith in food safety.

"The impression among many people may be that the German officials haven't got a clue what they're doing, even if that's far from the case," he said. "They just have not done a good job of explaining why their assessments keep changing and as a result, it may be a long time before many people eat cucumbers and sprouts again."

In Luxembourg, major vegetable producers Spain, Italy and France angrily demanded compensation Tuesday for farmers blindsided by huge losses in the E. coli outbreak. In response, EU Farm Commissioner Dacian Ciolos promised more than euro150 million ($219 million) in aid.

European farmers say they are losing up to 417 million euros ($611 million) a week.

Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, on Tuesday raised the number deaths to 24 � 23 in Germany and one in Sweden � and the number of infections in Germany to 2,325, including 642 patients with a rare complication that may lead to kidney failure. Ten other European countries and the United States have another 100 cases.

The institute said the number of new cases had declined � a sign the epidemic might have reached its peak � but added it was not certain whether that decrease will continue.

Hospitals in northern Germany were still being crushed by the demands of caring for so many E. coli patients.

A 41-year-old Hamburg lawyer was hospitalized for more than a week in a separate hospital ward for E. coli cases.

"When I got there, it wasn't that full yet, but then more patients came every day," she told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, speaking on condition of anonymity because she didn't want to identify her family. Now cured, she remains quarantined at home with no physical contact to avoid infecting anyone.

"People here are very, very much afraid," she said.

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Baetz reported from Berlin. David Rising in Hamburg and Raf Casert in Brussels and contributed to this report.

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CDC: Food poisoning from salmonella up in US (AP)

ATLANTA � More Americans got food poisoning last year, with salmonella cases driving the increase, the government reported Tuesday.

Illness rates for the most common serious type of E. coli fell last year. There was a rise in cases caused by other strains of the bacteria, although that bump may just reflect more testing was done for them, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.

An unusually aggressive strain of E. coli is behind the current large outbreak of food poisoning in Europe, mostly in Germany. That strain has never caused an outbreak in the U.S.

The CDC estimates that 50 million Americans each year get sick from foodborne illnesses, including about 3,000 who die.

The report released Tuesday is based on foodborne infections in only 10 states, or about 15 percent of the American population. But it has information that other databases lack and is believed to be a good indicator of food poisoning trends.

More than 19,000 cases of food poisoning were reported in those states last year. That was up from 17,500 cases in 2009, and about 18,500 in 2008.

Last year, there were 4,200 hospitalizations and 68 deaths in those states.

Year-to-year numbers can be misleading, especially from just a sample of states. Health officials note that the number of food poisoning cases have decreased by about a quarter since tracking began 15 years ago. Rates for most of the illnesses have also been relatively flat.

Not for salmonella, however. The bug caused the most illnesses of the nine leading food-poisoning causes last year. Salmonella cases haven't diminished in 15 years, and rose in the last few years by 10 percent.

"We've made virtually no progress against salmonella," said CDC Director Dr. Thomas Frieden.

One of the largest U.S. outbreaks last year involved salmonella tainted eggs that may have sickened as many as 56,000, according to a CDC estimate. That probably contributed to the increase seen in Tuesday's report, said Dr. Christopher Braden, a CDC epidemiologist.

The Food and Drug Administration last summer put in place new rules that should significantly reduce illnesses caused by salmonella in eggs, the FDA's Michael R. Taylor said.

Officials hope to put the same kind of dent in salmonella that they did with E. coli O157. The bacteria became infamous in a 1993 outbreak linked to Jack in the Box hamburgers.

More regulation and testing of meat helped cut those E. coli cases in half � from a rate of 2 per 100,000 people to less than 1 per 100,000 last year.

In the bad news department, health officials continue to see jumps in illness caused by a group of bacteria called vibrio, which are associated with shellfish. There were fewer than 200 vibrio cases reported in 2010, but that's more than double the numbers seen in the 1990s.

Vibrio cases are preventable. Flash-freezing and pasteurization of oysters could reduce the risk to consumers, Braden said.

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Online:

CDC report: http://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/FoodSafety/index.html

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Germany backtracks on sprouts as E. coli source (AP)

HAMBURG, Germany � First they pointed a finger at Spanish cucumbers. Then they cast suspicion on sprouts from Germany. Now German officials appear dumbfounded as to the source of the deadliest E. coli outbreak in modern history, and one U.S. expert called the investigation a "disaster."

Backtracking for the second time in a week, officials Monday said preliminary tests have found no evidence that vegetable sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany were to blame.

The surprise U-turn came only a day after the same state agency, Lower Saxony's agriculture ministry, held a news conference to announce that the sprouts appeared to be the culprit in the outbreak that has killed 22 people and sickened more than 2,330 others across Europe, most of them in Germany, over the past month.

Andreas Hensel, head of Germany's Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, warned, "We have to be clear on this: Maybe we won't be able anymore to identify the source."

Last week, German officials pointed to tainted cucumbers from Spain as a possible cause, igniting vegetable bans and heated protests from Spanish farmers, who suffered heavy financial losses. Researchers later concluded the Spanish cucumbers were contaminated with a different strain of E. coli.

"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," he said, accusing German authorities of casting suspicion on cucumbers and sprouts without firm data.

The European Union's health Commissioner defended German investigators, saying they were under extreme pressure as the crisis unfolded.

"We have to understand that people in certain situations do have a responsibility to inform their citizens as soon as possible of any danger that could exist to them," John Dalli said in Brussels.

In outbreaks, it is not unusual for certain foods to be suspected at first, then ruled out.

In 2008 in the U.S., raw tomatoes were initially implicated in a nationwide salmonella outbreak. Consumers shunned tomatoes, costing the tomato industry millions. Weeks later, jalapeno peppers grown in Mexico were determined to be the cause.

In 2006, lab tests mistakenly pointed to green onions in an E. coli outbreak at Taco Bell restaurants in the U.S. Investigators considered cheddar cheese and ground beef as the source before settling on lettuce.

With the culprit in the European crisis still a mystery, authorities stopped short of giving sprouts a clean bill of health. German Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner reiterated the warning against eating sprouts, as well as tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, which have also come under suspicion.

The agriculture ministry for Lower-Saxony state said 23 samples from the organic sprouts farm tested negative for the highly aggressive, "super-toxic" strain of E. coli that is killing people, with tests on 17 more samples still under way.

"A conclusion of the investigations and a clarification of the contamination's origin is not expected in the short term," the ministry said.

However, the negative test results do not mean that previous sprout batches weren't contaminated.

"Contaminated food could have been completely processed and sold by now," ministry spokeswoman Natascha Manski said.

In that case, the number of people stricken might keep rising for at least another week as the produce that could be causing the infections may have already been delivered to restaurants and grocery stores.

More than 630 of the victims are hospitalized with a rare, serious complication that can lead to kidney failure.

In a major difference from other E. coli outbreaks, women � who tend to eat more fresh produce � are by far the most affected this time, said Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute. The majority of them are between 20 and 50 years old and tend to be highly educated, very fit, and lead healthy lifestyles, Friedrich Hagenmueller of Asklepios Hospital in Hamburg said.

"What do they have in common: They are thin, clean, pictures of health," he said.

Ulrike Seinsche is one of the women diagnosed with the serious complication that can lead to kidney failure.

"I really got scared when the blood results came and were so bad and the doctors became hectic," she said from her hospital bed in Hamburg.She was quickly transferred into intensive care, got cramps and suffered "real death fear," she said. "Now, I'm actually stable."

Osterholm, whose team has investigated a number of foodborne outbreaks in the U.S., said authorities should trace foods back to their suppliers � which is exactly what led German officials to single out the sprout producer, linking it to several restaurants where more than 50 people fell ill.

Since 1996, about 30 outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. have been linked to raw or lightly cooked sprouts. Sprouts were also implicated a 1996 E. coli outbreak in Japan that killed 12 people and reportedly sickened more than 9,000.

At an EU health ministers meeting Monday in Luxembourg, Germany defended itself against accusations it had acted prematurely in pointing to Spanish cucumbers.

"The virus is so aggressive that we had to check every track," said Health State Secretary Annette Widmann-Mauz.

The EU will hold an emergency meeting of farm ministers Tuesday to address the crisis, including a ban imposed by Russia on all EU vegetables.

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Baetz reported from Berlin. Raf Casert in Brussels, Daniel Wools in Madrid, Kirsten Grieshaber in Berlin and AP Medical Writer Maria Cheng in London contributed to this report.

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Sprouts not apparently cause of E.coli outbreak (AP)

BERLIN � German officials say initial tests show that sprouts from an organic farm in the country's north are not the cause of the E. coli outbreak.

Lower-Saxony state's agriculture ministry said Monday that 23 of 40 samples from the sprout farm suspected of being behind the outbreak have tested negative for the relevant bacteria.

It said further tests are pending.

The E. coli outbreak in Germany has killed at least 22 people and sickened more than 2,300 across Europe, leaving customers uneasy about eating raw vegetables.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

BERLIN (AP) � German officials say initial tests show that sprouts from an organic farm in the country's north are not the cause of the E. coli outbreak.

Lower-Saxony state's agriculture ministry said Monday that 23 of 40 samples from the sprout farm suspected of being behind the outbreak have tested negative for the relevant bacteria.

It said further tests are pending.

The E. coli outbreak in Germany has killed at least 22 people and sickened more than 2,300 across Europe, leaving customers uneasy about eating raw vegetables.

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Focus shifts to sprouts in E.coli outbreak (AP)

BERLIN � Frightened consumers are awaiting the release of official test results that will most likely confirm that vegetable sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany caused the terrifying E. coli outbreak in Europe that has killed 22 and sickened more than 2,200.

Authorities say even if sprouts from the farm in the greater Uelzen region, between Hamburg and Hannover, are confirmed as the only source of the bacterial epidemic, more cases of the illness are likely for at least another week.

Health officials are warning against earting any sprouts, but are also keeping up a general warning for tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuces.

German Health Minister Daniel Bahr said late Sunday that the government cannot give an all-clear until the official results � expected for Monday � come in.

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