PARIS — The German government came under increased attack on Tuesday by critics at home and abroad, accusing it of mismanaging the E. coli crisis that has killed at least 22 people. German officials, however, reported a slight fall in the rate of newly reported infections.
According to the Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s disease control agency, on Tuesday, 2,325 confirmed and suspected cases of E. coli infection have been reported across Germany since early May, around 642 of them involving a virulent and potentially lethal complication that attacks the kidneys and the nerve system.
Of the 21 people who have died in Germany since the outbreak first began on May 1, 15 have died of the complication, the institute said. A 16th death has been reported from Sweden.
The levels of new cases “suggest a slight reduction in the number of cases” being reported, the institute said on its Web site. “It cannot currently be determined whether this reduction will continue.”
In Luxembourg, European agriculture ministers met on Tuesday to negotiate compensation for farmers whose sales have plummeted following German warnings — later dismissed as unfounded — that the outbreak originated in cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce grown in Spain.
Suspicion shifted Sunday to bean sprouts from a north German farm, only for scientists to report on Monday that tests on 23 out of 40 samples from the facility had proved negative. A suspect package of bean sprouts found past its sell-by date in the back of an E. coli patient’s refrigerator had also showed no traces of contamination, the Hamburg health authorities said on Tuesday.
“The consumers have been left in the lurch,” said Claudia Roth, a leader of the opposition Greens, sensing further political advantage after successes in regional elections that led to an about-face by Mrs. Merkel, disowning a nuclear energy policy she had long advocated with vigor.
The E. Coli outbreak has added to Europe’s woes as it confronts a stubborn debt crisis, forcing many governments to seek spending cuts at public institutions, including hospitals. In face of the strains on intensive care units coping with hundreds of patients, said Georg Baum, the head of the German Hospital Federation, “I appeal to politicians to rescind the planned financial cuts to hospitals.”
In Luxembourg, the European Union’s Farm Commissioner, Dacian Ciolos, proposed granting aid worth 150 million euros, or about $220 million, to help producers forced to dump crops — but that is only about one third of their estimated losses as the market for fresh food shrinks.
“We have been selling 35 percent less fresh produce since the food warnings,” said Roman Spirin, a storekeeper at a Russian-specialty supermarket in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. “So of course we buy less in. We can regulate that pretty well – the less the customers buy from us, the less we buy in. The real problems are with the wholesalers who simply have to destroy their produce.”
On a broader scale, Russia — a huge market for European Union produce — banned all imports last week.
Some farmers were reported to have taken unusual steps to dispose of their crops.
With Germany warning people in north Germany to avoid eating sprouts, cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce, one unconfirmed report in a Dutch newspaper said a Dutch farmer who had not been able to sell cucumbers to his usual customers in north Germany had donated a ton of them to a zoo in his own country to feed to the elephants.
In Hamburg at the epicenter of the outbreak, a senior health official, Cornelia Prüfer Storcks, said the number of infections reported by 10 a.m. Tuesday had risen to 898 — an increase of 49 since Monday that, she said, may indicate that the outbreak is tapering off.
But many critics of the official handling of the crisis say the welter of differing statistics and responses among state health authorities and governments has hampered Germany’s efforts to either pinpoint the origin of the crisis or halt it.European officials, moreover, faulted Germany for accusing Spanish growers without evidence to support their allegations.
The daily newspaper Die Welt reported on Tuesday that German health authorities were warned a year ago of the “high bacterial contamination of sprouts and kitchen-ready salad mixtures.” The warning by the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment was updated in May, the newspaper said.
