EU Seeks More Coca-Cola Study

As top executives lobbied to lift a ban on sales of Coca-Cola Co.’s major soft drinks, the European Union on Monday requested further investigations to find what caused dozens of people to become ill after drinking the company’s products.

The call for additional study came as the health scare spilled into Africa and as Coca-Cola and its local distributors launched a European advertising campaign defending the quality of their products as beyond reproach.

Coke Chairman and Chief Executive M. Douglas Ivester returned to Brussels on Monday with the company’s marketing chief, Charles Frenette, for meetings with Belgian government officials in an attempt to speed up the resumption of sales of Coke, Sprite and Fanta.

Belgium banned all Coca-Cola products June 14 and only restored some of its brands to store shelves Thursday.

The Atlanta-based company said Monday that reports it commissioned from toxicologists found no serious health risks in samples from plants in Dunkirk, France, and Antwerp, Belgium.

But health officials in Belgium expressed skepticism.

Coca-Cola has blamed defective carbon dioxide, used to put fizz in its drinks, for problems at its Antwerp plant, while the company said the outside of cans made in Dunkirk were contaminated with a wood preservative during shipping.

The company said these two unrelated problems have led to similar symptoms of nausea and vomiting. One company-commissioned study suggested the health problems were in the victims’ heads.

Two weeks ago, the first children with Coke complaints were hospitalized in Belgium. Since then, about 200 people have been treated for nausea, vomiting and hyperventilation after drinking Coca-Cola products.

“There is still nothing clear about the cause of the contamination,” Belgian Health Ministry spokesman Marc Pattyn said.

Because of the lingering uncertainty, the EU’s executive body, the European Commission, called for additional investigations.

“Belgium and France will have joint inspections on Coca-Cola plants in the next few days,” said Pietro Petrucci, a spokesman for the 15-nation EU Commission.

In addition to Belgium’s ban on both cans and bottles of Coke, Sprite and Fanta, France has stopped sales of all Coke cans produced in Dunkirk.

The Netherlands and Switzerland also have imposed selective bans.

The Ivory Coast seized nearly 50,000 cans of Coke imported from Europe as a precautionary measure and pulled them from supermarket shelves, trade officials said Monday.

Meanwhile, Coke cited a report from Robert Kroes of Utrecht University in the Netherlands that said that while there were unpleasant odors from the samples, any impurities were well within acceptable limits and much too weak to account for the illnesses.

In a similar analysis, toxicologist D. Lison at Catholic University in Louvain, Belgium, suggested the problem could be “a mass sociogenic illness,” or physical discomfort aggravated by an emotional reaction.

But Pattyn, the spokesman for Belgium’s Health Ministry, said: “Thirty children had to be hospitalized. Eight had to spend the night in hospital. Four had to spend two nights in hospital. It makes me doubt any argument about psychosomatic.”

Coca-Cola advertisements, meanwhile, began appearing in France, Italy, Greece and Spain defending the quality of the company’s soft drinks.

An ad appearing in major French dailies said that analyses by Coca-Cola and by independent teams show that “the drink is not in question. . . . Its quality is irreproachable.”

Coca-Cola shares fell $1.88 to close at $61.56 on the New York Stock Exchange.