E Coli Outbreak The announcement that cucumbers are not to blame is not too surprising, since cucumbers are not normally implicated in food poisoning outbreaks. They are so easy to clean for a start and bacteria are less likely to be able to find a protected spot.On the other hand, salads are a regular cause of outbreaks of food borne diseases including STEC like this one and Salmonella. Outbreaks associated with consumption of salads are quite common on both sides of the Atlantic. You can see from the attached US data that raw vegetables are a major cause of food poisoning outbreaks in the US.
The most implicated salad vegetables tend to be the green leafy ones such as lettuce or spinach. These salad vegetables offer good places for bacteria to hide and also can be difficult to wash. Indeed many people do not even bother washing these salad vegetables. Given what has been reported in the scientific literature about this outbreak so far (eg. this article) a salad source of this outbreak is still most likely. The initial epidemiology is showing significant associations with raw tomatoes, cucumbers and leafy salads.
When you have three food like this that tend to be eaten together it is often very difficult to identify which of the three is the exact cause by epidemiological methods alone.“Even though the cucumber hypothesis no longer appears to be the best bet, people should still be encouraged to properly wash all raw salads prior to consumption whether or not there happens to be an ongoing outbreak.”
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