110 cases in France over the past six years

The European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (EDCD) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) alerted Thursday March 30 to cases of contamination with a bacterium: 210 cases recorded in Europe over the past six years, and mainly these last months. These are people who had eaten in kebab restaurants, in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, the United Kingdom… but it is above all in France that the majority of these cases have been reported. Some 110 cases of Salmonella Virchow ST16 contamination have been identified in France, most of them in August and November.

Among the 210 victims reported across Europe (there are certainly more, insists the ECDC), some had to be hospitalized. In France, in 2022-2023, five of the 17 cases identified had to be hospitalized. Salmonella Virchow causes gastroenteritis, sometimes resistant to treatment.

All the patients had eaten meat in kebab restaurants. In France, this concerns five restaurants. The ECDC does not say where precisely. This salmonella, the analyzes show that it is found every time in chicken meat. Chicken distributed throughout Europe by several French restaurants and German suppliers. The same strain had been identified several months earlier in two French chicken farms, then slaughtered. The contamination could have been there, imagines the European agency, or even upstream, during reproduction. But, she concludes, without a batch number of kebab meat, the source could not be formally established. In this case, she warns, contamination could continue.

Contacted for more details, Friday March 31, the French ministries of Health and Agriculture have not yet answered us.