Authorities in Germany have declared an outbreak of norovirus among schoolchildren, first noted in late September, officially over after an apparent failure by catering operators to prepare frozen strawberries properly prior to their consumption.
The strawberries in question had been imported from China and were reportedly supplied by a catering company – said to be a distribitor to foodservice giant Sodexo – in ten different locations across Germany.
The outbreak led to more than 11,000 people, most of them schoolchildren, falling ill as a result of acute gastroenteritis in Berlin, Brandenberg, Thuringia, Saxony and Saxony-Anhalt.
Sources in the fresh produce trade indicated that lessons learned from the recent E coli outbreak in northern Germany had helped minimise the impact on the industry as a whole, with communication said to have been more coordinated and timed to reduce the spread of rumour and conjecture.
Germany's Federal Office of Consumer Protection and Food Safety, the Federal Institute for Risk Assessment and the Robert Koch-Institute worked together to investigate the norovirus cases and were apparently able to narrow down their search quickly to a batch of deep-frozen strawberries sourced from China.
"Backtracking in the various federal states further revealed that all affected kitchens had received the deep-frozen strawberries from a supplier in Saxony," the agencies said in a statement.
"There were no indications that the goods concerned had entered the retail trade. They were only delivered to large-scale kitchens."
