The authorities had targeted right. Pieces of meat seem to be the cause of serious food poisoning having touched around twenty children, including an 11-year-old daughter who died, in the agglomeration of Saint-Quentin (Aisne) in the past two weeks. Doubt was lifted this Friday evening by the prefecture of Aisne.
“Traces of contamination by the E. coli bacteria have been detected in the meats or on the areas of some of the butcheries that have been the subject of investigation,” she writes. Five businesses, all Halal, remain closed. Only the intermarché has been put out of cause, and its stand will be able to reopen.
Get out of “psychosis”
It remains to establish a formal link with children who have fallen sick – now 25, one more than Thursday evening, as well as an elderly person. The National Reference Center (CNR) of the Pasteur Institute must identify a strain of the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) in human samples. It will then be necessary to “cross” this result with the analyzes of pieces of meat, this time carried out by the National Reference Laboratory (LNR).
“The two LNR and CNR laboratories are mobilized to obtain first results as quickly as possible,” hammered the prefecture throughout the week.
The inhabitants of Saint-Quentin, met on the spot last Monday, were looking forward to how all these very young people had fallen ill. They wanted to get out of “psychosis” as quickly as possible, which moved to the city of 50,000 inhabitants.
The analyzes will continue on the samples taken, in order to understand if the same bacterial strain of E. coli present in a unique type of meat caused all these poisoning or if there have been several.
More broadly, the judicial investigation will also have to go back to the source of these infections with sometimes dramatic consequences, in order to understand how the food swallowed by children could be contaminated by the bacteria.
