Tag Archives: mussel

Raw is risky: 7 sick from NZ mussels

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Hawke’s Bay District Health Board is investigating four confirmed cases of Paratyphoid fever and is following up three suspect cases.

All four confirmed cases have required hospital care at Hawke’s Bay Hospital. At least two of the cases ate mussels gathered from Napier’s Ahuriri area. The district health board is also concerned that mussels from the same area, may have been eaten at a Tangi at the Tangoio Marae 11 days ago, and is following that up.

Medical Officer of Health Nick Jones said, “People with Paratyphoid can carry the (Salmonella Enterica) bacteria in their blood and in their stomach and gut so it is possible for it to be passed on through feces. Hand washing was extremely important to help prevent infecting other people as you can get paratyphoid if you eat or drink things that have been handled by a person who has the bacteria.”

 

Don’t poop on the mussels

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I enjoy a good mussel, with the broth and the bread and the beer.

doug.powell.mussels.nz.08
This report describes an outbreak investigation starting with two closely related suspected food-borne clusters of Dutch hepatitis A cases, nine primary cases in total, with an unknown source in the Netherlands. The hepatitis A virus (HAV) genotype IA sequences of both clusters were highly similar (459/460 nt) and were not reported earlier. Food questionnaires and a case–control study revealed an association with consumption of mussels.

Analysis of mussel supply chains identified the most likely production area. International enquiries led to identification of a cluster of patients near this production area with identical HAV sequences with onsets predating the first Dutch cluster of cases.

The most likely source for this cluster was a case who returned from an endemic area in Central America, and a subsequent household cluster from which treated domestic sewage was discharged into the suspected mussel production area.

Notably, mussels from this area were also consumed by a separate case in the United Kingdom sharing an identical strain with the second Dutch cluster.

In conclusion, a small number of patients in a non-endemic area led to geographically dispersed hepatitis A outbreaks with food as vehicle. This link would have gone unnoticed without sequence analyses and international collaboration.

International linkage of two food-borne Hepatitis A clusters through traceback of mussels, The Netherlands, 2012

Eurosurveillance, Volume 21, Issue 3

Boxman I, Verhoef L, Vennema H, Ngui S, Friesema I, Whiteside C, Lees D, Koopmans M.

http://www.eurosurveillance.org/ViewArticle.aspx?ArticleId=21356