Hamburg (Germany):
A puzzling outbreak of E Coli poisoning that has now spread to 12 countries appears to be stabilising, a senior German doctor said, as the death toll rose to 19.
As authorities continued to hunt the elusive source of the killer bug, the latest death was of an 80-year-old woman in the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania on Friday.
But even as German authorities were still warning consumers off raw vegetables, the European Union's (EU) Reference Laboratory for E Coli in Rome said scientific tests had failed to support a link to the outbreak.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel defended an earlier false alarm on organic Spanish cucumbers that angered Madrid, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin said he would not allow Russians to "get poisoned" by EU vegetables.
"The situation is that the number of new infections appears to be stabilising somewhat," Reinhard Brunkhorst, president of the German Nephrology Society, told reporters in Hamburg, the epicentre of the scare.
But he added, "We are dealing here in fact with the biggest epidemic caused by bacteria in recent decades."
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 EHEC poisoning, with symptoms including stomach cramps, diarrhoea, fever and vomiting.