E. Coli Strain Was Previously Unknown, Official Says

With hospitals coping with seriously ill victims, sectors of European agriculture staggering and consumers weighing what foods are safe to eat, Russia extended a ban on fresh vegetable imports beyond Spain and Germany to encompass all of the European Union, drawing a sharp response from European officials who called the move “disproportionate.”

In Geneva, Gregory Hartl, a spokesman for the World Health Organization, said, “What we understand is this is a strain which has never been detected in an outbreak situation before.” He said scientists at “many laboratories” were working to gather more information about the strain.

The origins of the outbreak, which has killed at least 17 people — 16 in Germany and a Swede who visited there recently — remain unknown. Ten countries have now reported cases, but virtually all of them have been traced to northern Germany, where the outbreak began several weeks ago.

In a statement on Thursday, a Chinese laboratory collaborating with German scientists said that the contagion had been caused by a “new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic.” The lab, the Beijing Genomics Institute in the southern city of Shenzhen, referred to the strain as “entirely new” and “super toxic,” saying it was similar to one known as EAEC 55989 that is found in the Central African Republic and known to cause serious diarrhea. The Chinese laboratory has been working with scientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

“The situation is still tense,” said Jörg Debatin, director of the medical center. “At the beginning of the week we had been hoping to see a trend towards fewer infections, but that has not happened.”

Holger Rohde, a bacteriologist at the medical center, said that tests conducted with the scientists in Shenzhen had shown that the new strain was a hybrid that causes the virulent complication called hemolytic uremic syndrome, which attacks the kidneys and can be lethal.

Dr. Rohde said that about 80 percent of the genetic composition derived from the E. coli strain O104, but that the other 20 percent came from another more toxic bacterium.

In recent days, the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, a European Union agency based in Stockholm, and other health authorities in Europe had placed blame for the outbreak on a rare strain of E. coli called O104:H4.

Since 2008, only eight cases have been linked to the strain reported in the European Union, according to the agency, whose Web site was still reporting on Thursday that laboratory results indicated O104:H4 carried in contaminated food was “the causative agent” of the outbreak in Germany and had also been detected in Denmark.

Britain’s Health Protection Agency confirmed that the number of cases in Britain had risen to seven from three, with the bacteria found in people who had recently traveled to Germany.

The W.H.O. said that Austria reported 2 cases, Denmark 7, France 6, the Netherlands 4, Norway 1, Spain 1, Sweden 28 and Switzerland 2. The organization said that all but two were people who had recently visited northern Germany or, in one case, had contact with a visitor from northern Germany.

Quite apart from health concerns, the impact of the outbreak spread increasingly to European politics and the Continent’s economic relations.

Russian news reports quoted health officials as saying that Moscow’s ban on European produce would begin immediately. If strictly enforced, the prohibition would magnify the woes of European Union farmers since Russia ranks among their biggest markets. Farmers in Germany and Spain have already complained that public fear of contagion has forced them to destroy their crops.

The spokesman for John Dalli, the European Union health commissioner, said the commission would send a letter later on Thursday to Moscow explaining why Russia should remove the restrictions. Russia relies on imports from the European Union for up to 40 percent of its fruits and vegetables and the market is worth up to $5.5 billion annually, according to the commission.

Late on Wednesday, the European Commission removed an alert about the possible dangers of infection from Spanish cucumbers that the German authorities originally suspected were responsible. The commission said it lifted the alert after tests conducted by the German and Spanish authorities failed to detect the strain of E. coli that caused the illnesses. Mr. Dalli urged the German authorities and other national authorities to “increase their efforts” to identify the source of the contamination.

Germans expressed growing anxiety.

When Sarah Winter, a 22-year-old economics student from Cologne,  first heard about the outbreak, she simply shrugged. “Another typical German food scare,” she said. “We have these scares once a year. One time it’s about contaminated eggs. Another time it’s about fodder fed to pigs. And then you get all this media panic. I ended up simply ignoring all of it.”

But by Thursday, Ms. Winter had changed her mind.

“It’s a big conversation issue among my friends,” she said. “Some are no longer eating salads. Others are ignoring the medical recommendations. As for myself, frankly, people have died. For me, that’s the bottom line. I no longer eat salads. But then again, this E. coli strain could be in milk, meat, whatever. It is very worrying. I have no idea what to eat anymore.”

Alan Cowell reported from Berlin, and James Kanter from Brussels. Judy Dempsey contributed reporting.

View the original article here

Magazine Preview: Watching the Murder of an Innocent Man

Pieter Hugo for The New York TimesKilling Field The open space between two squatter camps where Farai Kujirichita was beaten to death by vigilantes.

The mob, desperate for vengeance, had found an unlikely guide to lead them into their dark work. Fifteen-year-old Siphiwe, short, round-faced and reliably smiling, declared, "I know where these criminals live."

Memento A photograph of Farai, which his brother Clemence says was taken just weeks before he was killed.

He was a wayward teenager, a bad boy wanting to become a worse boy, and this gave him credibility in the matter of where vicious criminals might be found. A few men lifted him onto their shoulders so that the crowd, already in the hundreds, could see him better. Then an older man, wiser about these things, said to put the boy down. More than likely, they were about to kill someone. No one in the mob ought to be too conspicuous.

Diepsloot, in the northern reaches of Johannesburg, is a settlement of 150,000 people, the majority of them destitute. Crime oversteps even poverty as the most bedeviling affliction, and the night before, a gang of thugs marauded through one of the huge squatter camps in a subdivision called Extension 1. They were a methodical bunch, taking their time, shrewd about where to find stashes of cash amid the pittances, aware also of the police’s reluctance to enter the weave of shacks — the mokhukhus — where the narrow, unlighted pathways can be a fearsome labyrinth. The criminals killed two people, though the churning rumor mill put the number as high as 11.

Siphiwe himself claimed to have been robbed. “They took my cellphone,” he told the others. He was unaccustomed to feeling so important, and he walked cockily at the front of the mob along Thubelihle Street. It was close to noon on a cloudless Saturday morning in late January, the heart of the South African summer. The road abounded with township life: good music playing over bad radios, women pinning laundry to droopy clotheslines, storekeepers brushing aside plump flies in the butchery. People were curious about the mob’s intentions, and some followed along as if dutifully joining a militia.

In a few blocks, the pavement of Thubelihle gave way to hard-packed dirt and stones. A busted pipe had gone unrepaired for months, and the escaping water cut a trough in the ground that now carried a stream of garbage and sewage. The odor was bracing, but there was open air ahead, a large, marshy field that separated Extension 1 from the squatter camp in Extension 2. The mob took an undulating footpath across the terrain, and once it halted, Siphiwe pointed out an empty shack and a locked trailer. These belong to criminals, he said, and the structures were easily torn apart with a few tools and strong hands and then set on fire.

People cheered the crackling of the flames, but this minor demolition was hardly enough to bring their wrath to a cathartic finish. Mob justice is not uncommon in Diepsloot, and most often it involves the swift capture of a supposed criminal, the villain there to beat up, to stone, perhaps even to wrap in a petrol-soaked shroud. But this undertaking was something entirely different. The vigilantes had walked a long distance on a hot day in the uncertain pursuit of unspecified thugs — all on the word of this talkative boy.

The crowd eventually migrated from the cramped lanes of the mokhukhus to a clearing used as a soccer field. A meeting began, and several women from Extension 2 shouted angrily about crime: the shootings and the rapes and how they have to hide their children under the beds. One claimed that criminals hung out in front of a tiny store, what’s known as a spaza shop. The business’s entire stock consisted of two bags of Simba cheese snacks, she said scornfully. “How can you have a spaza that sells only two Simbas?”

Siphiwe led the way, back along the dusty paths between the shacks to the edge of the marshy field. The spaza shop was locked, and though empty of people, it was actually well supplied with soft drinks, biscuits, beer, toiletries and paraffin. The mob nevertheless busted through the walls, and Siphiwe rooted around in a back room, collecting for himself two pairs of sneakers, a Nike track suit and a nylon jacket. The shop was set ablaze, again to the noisy approval of the crowd, though this, too, seemed scant retaliation against murderous thugs. Where were those despicable people?

As the restless mob milled about, a 26-year-old Zimbabwean immigrant named Farai Kujirichita emerged from one of the narrow passageways that led to the field. He was wearing a carefully pressed, lilac-colored shirt and talking into his cellphone. By then, many people were coming and going; his arrival was nothing remarkable. And yet some men from the crowd confronted him.

“Who are you talking to?” they wanted to know. “Who are you warning?”

Then came a more complicated question. “Where are you from?”

Foreigners, especially Zimbabweans, are blamed for much of the crime in Diepsloot. Farai must have decided that it would be safer to lie. He said he was a South African, and his response was in Sepedi, a South African language. This was risky. Nationalities can be easy to surmise, telltale from accents, the style of clothing, the shape of a face, the rhythm in a walk.

Barry Bearak (bearak@nytimes.com) has spent the last three years as a bureau chief for southern Africa for The Times. Editor: Vera Titunik (v.titunik-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

View the original article here