© APNicoletta Pabst smiles during an interview with the Associated Press in Hamburg, Germany, Saturday,
Berlin - Nicoletta Pabst could not believe what she saw twelve days ago when she rushed to a Hamburg hospital with stomach cramps, diarrhea and blood in her stool.
The emergency room at the University Medical Center in Hamburg-Eppendorf was engulfed by chaos, she said, overwhelmed as it tried to treat hordes of
E. coli victims."
All patients suspected of
E. coli were led to a separate location for examination," Pabst told The Associated Press in an interview Saturday. "When I arrived, there were at least 20 other people and more and more kept coming in, many of them by ambulance."
She said the emergency room's sanitary conditions were horrendous.
"All of us had diarrhea and there was only one bathroom each for men and women - it was a complete mess," she said. "If I hadn't been sick with
E. coli by then, I probably would have picked it up over there."
Hamburg is at the epicenter of the deadliest
E. coli outbreak in modern history.
Germany's national disease control center raised the death toll Sunday to 22 people - 21 in Germany and one in Sweden - and said another 2,153 people in Germany have been sickened since May 2. That figure included 627 people who have developed a rare, serious complication of the disease that can cause kidney failure. Ten other European nations and the U.S. have reported a total of 90 other victims.
"We'd all been reading the scary news about the
E. coli outbreak in our region for days," said Pabst, a 41-year-old homemaker. "(My husband) took me to the university hospital right away."