Tag Archives: Product Recall

New E.coli outbreak

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Six children are in a serious condition in France with E.coli infections after eating meat thought to have come from Germany, where an outbreak of the bacteria has killed 37 people.

The children had eaten beefburgers made by French company SEB which said the meat was taken from animals slaughtered in three European countries and processed in France.

“There’s meat from Germany, there’s meat from Belgium and from Holland,” said SEB chief executive Guy Lamorlette.

Six children, aged between 20 months and eight years old, were taken to a hospital in Lille, northern France on Wednesday and one child was later released.

E.coli bacteria

E.coli bacteria

A seventh child was taken to hospital on Thursday.

A spokesman for the Regional Health Agency (ARS) said: “They are in a serious but not worrying state. Their lives are not at all in danger.”


The “Steak Country” burgers were bought in French branches of German supermarket Lidl.

SEB has recalled the burgers and Lidl said it had removed boxes from its shelves in France.

The outbreak comes on the heels of E.coli cases linked to contaminated bean sprouts which has killed 36 people in Germany and one in Sweden and sickened 3,300 people in 16 countries.

However, health authorities said they had not found a link at present with the previous cases.

ME not linked to a virus

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The journal Science has asked the authors of a research paper, which linked chronic fatigue syndrome to a virus, to withdraw their findings.

It has also published an editorial expressing concern that the validity of the study was “seriously in question”.

The authors said they were “extremely disappointed” and that the editorial was “premature”.

An expert in the UK said any link with chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME, was a myth and the decision was inevitable.

In 2009, a study at the Whittemore Peterson Institute was published in Science which showed that DNA from a mouse virus, XMRV, was present in 67% of patients with chronic fatigue syndrome, but only 4% of the general population.

chronic fatigue syndrome

chronic fatigue syndrome

Science’s editor in chief, Bruce Alberts, said at least 10 studies had since failed to reproduce those results, including two studies published at the same time as his editorial.

One concluded that the mostly likely explanation for the 2009 finding was that laboratory samples were contaminated with XMRV.

The other looked at 61 patients with chronic fatigue syndrome who took part in the original study, but it found no trace of XMRV.

As a result, Science asked for the authors of the 2009 research paper to voluntarily retract their findings. They declined.

Annette Whittemore, President of the Whittemore Peterson Institute, said: “We are extremely disappointed that the editor of Science has published an ‘editorial expression of concern’”.

She said that other studies had not used the same experiments as the original study and that: “The authors of the Lombardi study believe that it is premature to conclude that the negative studies are accurate or change the conclusions of the original studies.


“Much of the work on this new retrovirus has yet to be performed, and we look forward to new studies which will support the results and findings described by these accomplished scientists.”

Dr Jonathan Stoye, virologist at the Medical Research Council National Institute of Medical Research, said: “It comes as no great surprise, in fact it was inevitable since a series of studies failed to reproduce the original results.”

“It should be made as definitive as possible that XMRV is not linked to chronic fatigue syndrome. It is a myth.”

He said the implication was that the samples were contaminated, however this had not been definitively proven.

He added: “Science could have gone one step further and withdrawn it off its own bat. In football this is somewhere between a red and a yellow card.”