Shortcomings now in focus as European E. coli outbreak ebbs

BERLIN -- The battle against Europe's deadly E. coli outbreak descended into cacophony and confusion. Now that the crisis is stabilizing, German officials acknowledge lessons to be learned.

Among the problems: a tangle of federal and regional authorities, chaotic communication and a system for reporting cases that many say is antiquated.

Cases began appearing at the start of May, and the outbreak swelled to crisis level over the next three weeks -- with the German city of Hamburg at the epicenter. It appears to be waning after sickening more than 3,000 people and killing 36.

"We must succeed in speaking with one voice in order to give citizens the necessary information, the necessary transparency," Health Minister Daniel Bahr conceded after officials on Friday finally declared sprouts from a farm in northern Germany to be the culprit.

A case in point: The sprouts were first fingered as a likely cause by regional officials nearly a week earlier, but authorities backtracked when initial tests turned out negative.

All the while, a warning against cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce, based purely on patient interviews, remained in place, causing major losses for farmers -- especially in Spain.

Hamburg officials for days fingered Spanish cucumbers as the probable source, but tests cleared them.

The European Union's health commissioner at one point warned Germany against issuing more premature conclusions about the origin of contaminated food.

Critics say the outbreak exposed weaknesses in Germany's cherished but sometimes cumbersome federal system, in which -- alongside national institutions -- 16 state governments have their own health authorities, a state of affairs that can result in long, potentially time-consuming, reporting chains.

An editorial in the medical journal Lancet remarked that "coordination of the German public health response seems to have been utterly absent" and said that underlined a wider lack of coordination in Europe. It said "there is a strong case for a Europe-wide review of national and continental responses to infectious disease outbreaks."