Poisonings due to the “E.coli” bacteria in Aisne: thirty cases recorded

Four people are still hospitalized following the wave of E.coli poisonings that killed a young girl in mid-June, the Aisne prefecture announced on Tuesday, July ^1. "Thirty cases were reported to us during the epidemiological investigation," Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said on RTL, adding that "every case that now appears in a hospital is identified and analyzed."

The Saint-Quentin public prosecutor's office, which had opened a preliminary investigation into the charges of involuntary manslaughter, involuntary injury, endangerment and deception aggravated by endangering human health, relinquished jurisdiction on June 25 in favor of the public health division of the Paris public prosecutor's office, given the number of victims and the complexity of the investigations.

The 30 cases include a 73-year-old and 29 children, including Elise, who died on June 16 at the age of 11. The prosecutor said the youngest child affected was an 11-month-old female baby. "The health of all those infected is improving," the Aisne prefecture said Tuesday evening. "Four are still hospitalized and none are receiving dialysis," the prefecture added in a statement.

Two investigations, one of a so-called "epidemiological" health nature, and one of a judicial nature, are being conducted in parallel. The epidemiological investigation determined that the origin of the E. coli bacteria was contamination following the consumption of meat, hence the closure of butcher shops, the prefecture recalled, specifying that four butcher shops in Saint-Quentin and the meat section of a supermarket remain closed.

The Paris prosecutor said she was waiting for more precise results from the sequencing of the bacteria's genome "probably on Wednesday" , which " will allow us to determine with certainty that all the victims were contaminated by the same bacteria" . "Then we will compare them with the samples taken from the butcher shops [in question] " , she explained.

"The E.coli bacteria is found everywhere. Every individual even has it in their intestines. The difficulty is that there are E.coli bacteria that are called "pathogenic" and that cause poisoning, the prosecutor added. She did not rule out other cases if people defrost and consume previously purchased meat, specifying that the time "for development and appearance of symptoms is between ten and fifteen days."

The prosecutor stressed that the last two cases were linked to "secondary contamination, through the hands. That is to say, an infected person had to (...) leave the toilet without washing their hands properly, and hold the hands of another person who would then be contaminated."