Berlin, Jun 11 (AP) After a month of searching and testing thousands of vegetables, simple detective work trumped science in the hunt for the source of the world's deadliest E.
coli outbreak. The culprit: German-grown sprouts.
Health officials announced Friday that sprouts from a farm in northern Germany caused the outbreak that has killed 31 people, sickened nearly 3,100 and prompted much of Europe to shun vegetables.
"It was like a crime thriller where you have to find the bad guy," said Helmut Tschiersky-Schoeneburg, head of Germany's consumer protection agency.
Health officials said they tracked the bacteria's path from hospital patients struggling with diarrhea and kidney failure, to the restaurants where they had dined, to specific meals and ingredients they ate, and finally back to a single farm.