Sprouts weren't beloved, anyway

Christina Gossman has a post at Slate.com about the German problem with E. coli:

The German blame-the-wrong-veggie game seems to have come to an end pretty much where it began. After officially stating on 6 June that the origin of deadly E. coli bacteria could not be traced to Spanish cucumbers, nor German sprouts, the head of Germany’s national disease control center now says that bean sprouts are in fact the common denominator.
Though test results from an organic farm in northern Germany came back negative earlier this week, the taskforce determined that there was enough evidence: eleven out of thirty members of a Swedish tour group fell ill after eating at a golf hotel in Lueneburg district which had been supplied by the sprout producer. Seventeen others became sick after eating meals containing sprouts at a restaurant in Luebeck, according to Der Spiegel and CNN. And the list goes on.
Sounds like some serious digging for information? Indeed. The investigators studied menus, ingredients, bills, and even took pictures of meals to show to those fallen ill. “It was like a crime thriller where you have to find the bad guy,” Helmut Tschiersky-Schoeneburg of Germany’s consumer protection agency said, according to The Guardian.
The outbreak is declining, though not over yet. Twenty nine people have died and almost three thousand have been infected, seven hundred of whom have suffered serious complications of the intestinal illness.
Economic collateral damage, on the other hand, is really starting to manifest now. Farmers in Spain, France, Holland, and Belgium are seeking compensation for their losses, and although the European Commission has proposed to pay $300 million, Spain alone is claiming $600 million.