Hajj Hassan: Lebanon Veggies Safe, EU Import Ban to Be Lifted Monday
Lebanon will on Monday lift a ban on the import of vegetables from Europe imposed in the wake of the recent deadly E. coli outbreak, caretaker Agriculture Minister Hussein Hajj Hassan announced Sunday.
Hajj Hassan reassured consumers about the safety of vegetables in Lebanon, noting that vegetables “are subjected to laboratory tests on a periodic basis.”
Lebanon had imposed the ban on June 3. Back then Hajj Hassan said the ban posed "no risk of shortages on the local market," as Lebanon could count on its own production and that of neighboring Jordan and Syria.
Russia had also banned all vegetable imports from the European Union, sparking an angry response from the 27-nation bloc which warned the move was at odds with Moscow’s bid to join the World Trade Organization.
Moscow agreed at a summit with the EU on Friday to lift the ban.
Like Russia, Lebanon is not currently a WTO member.
The EU had slammed Lebanon's decision to ban vegetable imports, saying that “any total embargo on European vegetables is disproportionate.”
Germany's health minister warned Sunday of more deaths from an outbreak of E. coli that has already killed at least 33 people, despite the source having been identified and new infections falling.
"More fatalities cannot be ruled out, painful though it is to say so," Daniel Bahr told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
"The continuing fall in the number of new infections gives grounds for optimism. But that does not rule out more cases of EHEC (enterohaemorrhagic E. coli)," he said.
All but one of the 33 deaths from EHEC poisoning have been in Germany, with the other being a woman in Sweden who had recently traveled to Germany. More than 3,000 people have also fallen ill in 14 countries.
Authorities have identified the source of the weeks-long outbreak as being vegetable sprouts from an organic farm in Lower Saxony, northern Germany.
The farm has been closed and all its products recalled. The farm cultivated sprouts from a variety of products including lettuce, azuki beans, mung beans, fenugreek, alfalfa and lentils.
With German authorities only late last week dropping advice, particularly in northern Germany, to avoid uncooked tomatoes, cucumbers and lettuce, the scare has cost European farmers hundreds of millions of euros.
The Robert Koch Institute (RKI), Germany's national disease agency, still recommends not eating raw vegetable sprouts.
Particularly badly hit were Spanish producers after Germany initially and erroneously blamed cucumbers grown there.
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