10th Food Poisoning Victim Dies

A food poisoning mystery that investigators have yet to solve claimed its 10th fatality Friday, a 12-year-old girl who died a month after eating a contaminated school lunch.

Despite almost three months of investigation, health officials cannot pinpoint the source of the elusive, virulent 0157 E. coli bacteria that has sickened more than 6,000 children in the Osaka suburb of Sakai and caused smaller outbreaks across Japan.

Farmers have begun dumping fresh produce that consumers are afraid to eat. And there are complaints of discrimination against people suspected--often erroneously--of carrying 0157.

The Sakai school district has formed a special committee to deal with bullying of children who have been sick with food poisoning symptoms. Healthy children have begun calling them baikin, the Japanese word for bacteria.

Adult residents of Sakai have also reportedly been refused hotel reservations elsewhere in the country. A salesman who works in an electronics company where one employee died after eating a cafeteria lunch--but who is perfectly healthy--reported being denied a restaurant reservation when it was learned where he worked.

Several workers have complained that they have been laid off or fired because their children are sick; the 0157 bacteria is known to cause secondary infections among family members of victims.

The lack of progress against what headlines call “the invisible enemy” makes it harder to combat such behavior.

Health and Welfare Minister Naoto Kan had to eat crow--in this case, radish sprouts--after his ministry announced that the sprouts were the likely culprit but then failed to turn up a single 0157 bacillus despite exhaustive searches of radish farms.

Under pressure from furious radish-sprout growers, the minister patiently chomped down three bowls of the greens Thursday while the cameras rolled.

Kan pronounced the sprouts delicious and added: “They are safe, as long as you wash them.”

But he made it clear that the ministry had no intention of apologizing to the radish growers, a move that could lead to claims for compensation after the ministry fingered the sprouts from a single farm as being the only raw ingredient common to food poisoning outbreaks in Sakai schools, a nearby nursing home and a company cafeteria in Kyoto. Markets immediately yanked the greens off the shelves.

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Investigators reported finding an identical DNA pattern in 0157 samples taken from patients in the three separate outbreaks. But inspectors failed to find 0157 in the seeds, water, growing areas or packaging of the sprouts at the suspected radish farm in Habikino, in western Japan, or any other grower.

Health ministry spokesman Hiroki Yamamoto defended the decision to make its suspicions public before confirming the presence of 0157 in radish sprouts.

“What we really meant in the report is that the radish sprouts distributed by the particular grower could be the source, but we did not mean radish sprouts in general,” he said.

The sprouts have not been acquitted yet.

On Friday, Wakayama prefecture, or state, announced that victims of its food poisoning outbreak had also eaten radish sprouts shipped from the same grower implicated in the other three incidents.

The persistent epidemic has changed the practice of Japanese cuisine in many homes. Raw vegetables, salad, fish and meat are out; well-cooked food is in.

“I’m only eating things you can heat thoroughly . . . and I’m even cooking tomatoes,” said Tokyo shopper Yukiko Ishizuka, 49. “We’ve stopped eating salad, even though it’s summer and I would really like to eat it.”

Sales of lettuce are one-third what they were last year; farmers in Nagano prefecture threw away 1,300 tons this month. Ishizuka and other shoppers said they feel sorry for the radish-sprout growers, but they will not be buying those products for a while, despite Kan’s demonstration.

As of Friday, there were 9,412 new cases of 0157 this year, and 319 people remained hospitalized.