Europe E.coli is toxic new strain, trade row grows

A highly infectious new strain of E.coli bacteria is causing a deadly outbreak of food poisoning that is spreading from Germany across Europe, scientists said on Thursday, raising alarm bells worldwide.

Experts in China, part of a global network of laboratories racing to understand the sickness which killed a 17th victim overnight, said they had found the bug carried genes that made it resistant to several classes of antibiotics.

The U.N. said the strain had not infected people before.

With more than 1,500 people already ill in one of the worst recorded outbreaks of E.coli, Russia prompted international recriminations by banning imports from the European Union of raw vegetables, thought to be the likely source of infection.

"This E. coli is a new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic," said the Chinese scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen city.

At the World Health Organization, the United Nations health watchdog, a spokeswoman said: "This strain has never been seen in an outbreak situation before."

Holger Rohde, a bacteriologist at Hamburg University Hospital, which has been at the epicenter of the sickness first reported last week said: "We have detected that it is indeed a new, not yet described, variant of this pathogen.

"We will be able to draw conclusions from this in future."

Cases have been reported in at least 10 European countries and the United States, although almost all those outside Germany are in people who had recently been there.

Moscow had already banned imports of vegetables from Germany and Spain because of the infections, which German officials originally blamed on contaminated cucumbers imported from Spain before backtracking and apologizing to Madrid.

Russia's ban on Thursday on all raw vegetables from the European Union prompted cries of protest from the Polish and Dutch governments and a rebuke from the European Commission.

Gennady Onishchenko, head of the Russian consumer protection agency Rospotrebnadzor, said the deaths showed the "much-praised European sanitary legislation, which Russia is being urged to adopt, does not work," Interfax news agency reported.

The new ban would take effect on Thursday morning, he said. The European Commission said it would write to Moscow within hours to say the move was "disproportionate."

FARMIMNG ANGER

Spain is threatening legal action over the crisis. It wants compensation for its farmers, who say lost sales are costing them 200 million euros ($287 million) a week and could put 70,000 people out of work.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said the European Commission had been slow to act.