© Agence France-PresseCucumber crisis: Some 112,000 cases of vegetables, mostly tomatoes and cucumbers had to be destroyed after prices dropped dramatically at auctions in Germany.
As authorities continued to hunt the source of the outbreak, Germany's national disease center, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), is looking closely at a harbor festival that took place in Hamburg between May 6 and May 8.
The weekly newspaper Focus said Saturday the festival drew 1.5 million visitors from Germany and abroad and noted that the first reported case of E. coli infection followed just a week later in the city's university hospital.
German media also said Saturday that a man in his 50s who died in Brandenberg may be the 20th victim, but the cause of death was uncertain because he had several other infections as well as E. coli.
The latest confirmed death was of an 80-year-old woman in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Friday.
She succumbed as German authorities were still warning consumers off raw vegetables, despite the EU's Reference Laboratory for E. coli in Rome saying scientific tests had failed to support a link to the outbreak.
Faced with uncertainty over the source of the outbreak, reports said police were investigating a possible deliberate act and were also checking two restaurants in the northern town of Lubeck, one in which 17 diners fell ill and another in which eight women were sickened, one of whom died.
All but one of the fatalities since the outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) poisoning began last month have occurred in Germany. A patient who died in Sweden had recently returned from Germany.
Regional German health authorities have reported more than 2,000 cases of people falling ill, with symptoms including stomach cramps, diarrhea, fever and vomiting.
A large majority are female, suggesting the source is "probably something that women prefer more than men," Andrea Ellis, an epidemiologist at the World Health Organisation's (WHO) department of food safety, said in Geneva.
In addition to Germany, cases of E. coli poisoning have been reported in Austria, Britain, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
Britain confirmed four more cases of poisoning on Friday, bringing the total number of infected in the country to 11.
A large majority are female, suggesting the source is "probably something that women prefer more than men," Andrea Ellis, an epidemiologist at the World Health Organisation's (WHO) department of food safety, said in Geneva.
Didn't some unnamed speculators buy up all the chocolate supply last summer??