June 16, 2011 | 7:28 PM |

Ten Tons Of Hamburger Recalled In France, As Children Are Hospitalized With E. Coli

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, E. coli, food poisoning

Defrosted hamburger appears to be the latest source of E. coli infections

Food poisoning lawyer Bill Marler blogs about the latest grim development on the E. coli front:

Seven children have been hospitalized in France with E. coli infections after eating meat that manufacturer SEB said came from Germany, Belgium and Holland and slaughtered and processed in France. The children, the youngest of whom is 20 months old, had eaten defrosted hamburgers.

A spokesman for the Regional Health Agency (ARS) in Lille, northern France, where six of the children were hospitalized on Wednesday, said: ‘they are in a serious but not worrying state. Their lives are not at all in danger.’ A seventh child was taken to hospital on Thursday, authorities said.

The ‘Steak Country’ burgers were bought in French branches of German supermarket Lidl. SEB said it had recalled 10 tons of the burgers and Lidl said it had removed them from its shelves in France.

Health authorities said the infection was a rare strain of the E. coli bacteria and was not linked to the similar outbreak in Germany.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →