Euro food poisoning scandals

Overview
The Salmonella in eggs controversy lead to Edwina Currie's regression as a government minister in December 1988 after she issued a hard-line warning about salmonella in British eggs.

Background
Hard boil eggs were a staple part of the British and Irish diet and was indeed a UK wide obsession back then. The government had promoted them in the 1970s withe the "Go crack an egg!" and "Go to work on an egg!" government healthy eating TV and radio ads in the 1970s.

The event
The infamous comment that "most of the egg production in this country, sadly, is now affected with salmonella" caused a moral panic in the general public, who feared the worse. It both sparked outrage among British farmers and egg producers as it caused egg sales in the UK to rapidly decline by 60 percent. The subsequent loss of revenue led to the slaughter of 4,000,000 hens. Edwina Currie failed to clarify that she meant the egg production flock; not "most eggs produced" by then and thus the public thought they were domed. The British newspapers fed on the crisis in order to boost thire readership and thus cause even more panic amongst the general public.

N. Ireland
The province was largely agrarian outside of the industrial city of Belfast. Many of the farms produced eggs, hence there was particular anger in the province of Northern Ireland.

The 1988 Christmas party of the Industrial Development Board for Northern Ireland the featured dish was curried eggs as a protest over the issue and an attempt to help restore public confidence in eggs.

Penitence
She began the National Egg Awareness Campaign in 1990 as an act of penitence.

Nickname
It earned her the nickname "Eggwina".

There was particular anger in Northern Ireland where egg production is a significant part of the economy. At the Christmas party of the Industrial Development Board for Northern Ireland that year the featured dish was curried eggs. To make amends, in 1990, she began the National Egg Awareness Campaign. The controversy gained her the nickname "Eggwina."

The true extent
Evidence had emerged that a mid-1980s liberalising regulation change had allowed salmonella to get a hold in many flocks. It was confirmed to have doped back to roughly pre-rise levels by 1990. The controversies had died down by 1991.

It was revealed in 2001 that a government cover-up has hidden the results of a Whitehall report produced a few months after Edwina Currie's resignation that found that there had been a "salmonella epidemic of considerable proportions.", so meaning she was more by luck than judgment right after all!

A novel strain of Escherichia coli O104:H4 bacteria caused a serious outbreak of foodborne illness focused in northern Germany in May through June 2011. The illness was characterized by bloody diarrhea, with a high frequency of serious complications, including hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), a condition that requires urgent treatment. The outbreak was originally thought to have been caused by an enterohemorrhagic (EHEC) strain of E. coli, but it was later shown to have been caused by an enteroaggregative E. coli (EAEC) strain that had acquired the genes to produce Shiga toxins, present in organic fenugreek sprouts.

Epidemiological fieldwork suggested fresh vegetables were the source of infection. The agriculture minister of Lower Saxony identified an organic farm[1] in Bienenbüttel, Lower Saxony, Germany, which produces a variety of sprouted foods, as the likely source of the E. coli outbreak.[2] The farm was shut down.[2] Although laboratories in Lower Saxony did not detect the bacterium in produce, a laboratory in North Rhine-Westphalia later found the outbreak strain in a discarded package of sprouts from the suspect farm.[3] A control investigation confirmed the farm as the source of the outbreak.[4] On 30 June 2011, the German Bundesinstitut für Risikobewertung (BfR) (Federal Institute for Risk Assessment), an institute of the German Federal Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Consumer Protection, announced that seeds of organic[5] fenugreek imported from Egypt were likely the source of the outbreak.[6]

In all, 3,950 people were affected and 53 died, 51 of whom were in Germany.[7] 800 people suffered hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), which can lead to kidney failure.[8] A handful of cases were reported in several other countries including Switzerland,[9] Poland,[9] the Netherlands,[9] Sweden,[9] Denmark,[9] the UK,[9][10] Canada[11] and the USA.[11][12] Essentially all affected people had been in Germany or France shortly before becoming ill.

Initially, German officials made incorrect statements on the likely origin and strain of Escherichia coli.[13][14][15][16] The German health authorities, without results of ongoing tests, incorrectly linked the O104 serotype to cucumbers imported from Spain.[17] Later, they recognised that Spanish greenhouses were not the source of the E. coli and cucumber samples did not contain the specific E. coli variant causing the outbreak.[18][19] Spain consequently expressed anger about having its produce linked with the deadly E. coli outbreak, which cost Spanish exporters US$200 million per week.[20] Russia banned the import of all fresh vegetables from the European Union from early June until 22 June 2011.[21]

Also see

 * 1) EU
 * 2) NATO
 * 3) The Troubles
 * 4) Threat construction
 * 5) British Miners Strike