German officials said today initial tests provided no evidence that sprouts from an organic farm in northern Germany were the cause of the country’s deadly E. coli outbreak.

The Lower-Saxony state agriculture ministry said 23 of 40 samples from the sprout farm suspected of being behind the outbreak have tested negative for the highly agressive, "super-toxic" strain of E. coli bacteria. It said tests were still under way on the other 17 sprout samples.

"The search for the outbreak’s cause is very difficult as several weeks have passed since its suspected start," the ministry said in a statement, cautioning that further testing of the sprouts and their seeds was necessary to achieve full certainty.

Negative test results on sprout batches now, however, do not mean that previous sprout batches weren’t contaminated.

Osterholm gets it right when he tells msnbc, "All this wishy-washy back-and-forth, it’s just incompetence. Where’s the epidemiology?"

Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota says that continuing failure to identify the source of the deadly German outbreak of E. coli poisoning points to a flawed investigation that could shake faith in the global public health system.

European food safety officials appear to rely far more on bacterial cultures than on tracing back what people involved in the outbreak actually ate — and where it came from. But a microbiological approach has repeatedly been shown to fall short of a detailed study of the epidemiology, or health patterns, that characterize foodborne illness outbreaks, Osterholm said.

And why does no one seem to care that a bunch of Spanish cucumbers were E. coli positive, just not the outbreak strain? Are they grown in sewage?