Via The Guardian, an op-ed: Lift the cloak of secrecy around this E coli outbreak. Excerpt:
An eight-month outbreak of an uncommon type of E coli food poisoning left 250 people ill and one dead, with cases continuing to emerge until July of this year – but the public has only been told now. After six months of investigation by the Health Protection Agency, which has only just acknowledged the outbreak, the infection has ultimately been linked to people handling loose raw leeks and potatoes in their homes.
This news reveals a little bit about food-borne risks and a great deal about the politics of food safety in Britain. The Food Standards Agency was created to provide the public with high standards of food safety and ways of setting and enforcing those standards that commanded public trust and confidence. Grounds for such trust have been seriously undermined.
The politics of these events are fascinating. First, the way in which the problem was handled in Whitehall was complicated by internal squabbles: who was in charge: the Food Standards Agency or the Health Protection Agency?
Despite both being directly accountable to the minister for public health, Anne Milton, they were at loggerheads. Responsibility for investigating outbreaks of bacterial food poisoning lies with the HPA, but the FSA insisted that communications with the public and the media on all matters of food safety were solely its responsibility. Thursday's belated press release came from the HPA, though it did include a comment from the FSA, albeit a fatuous one.
The HPA had a difficult task to try to locate the source of the infection. It knew about 250 cases, although there must have been far more; public health microbiologists suggest that fewer than 10% of cases are formally reported. Cases were widely dispersed across Britain, though a large majority were female. The HPA concluded that the infection was probably transmitted in soil contamination on vegetables, but the original source of the infection remains unknown.
Sources within the FSA suggest that the recent experience in Germany, when an outbreak of E coli was misleadingly attributed to Spanish cucumbers – resulting in significant losses to Spanish farmers and threats of litigation – that the organisation was wary; but that suggestion is unconvincing. The German problem emerged in June, while the decision not to tell the British public must have been taken either at the end of 2010 or early this year.
The FSA's line is that it did not wish to say anything publicly until it has something "useful" to contribute, but useful to whom? The evidence suggests that it did not want to scare the public and disrupt normal commerce, nor did it wish to reveal how little it knew and how weak its control over microbiological food safety really is.
