Food scandal in Hesse: Contradictions about the cause of death

The hospital says the patient did not die from the listeria in the food. The authorities have different information.

Has Hessen’s latest food scandal cost a human life? The competent authority in Darmstadt says yes. The patient at the Offenbach Sana Clinic died of an infection with Listeria. The hospital contradicts: The cause of death was not the food, but a severe pneumococcal and corona disease. The public prosecutor’s office, which is investigating the owner of a medium-sized company in Gernsheim in the Groß Gerau district, will have to find out the truth.

This is where the salad ingredients come from, which the Food Control Task Force in the Darmstadt Regional Council (RP) identified in February as the source of the hospital food contaminated with Listeria. The district had not controlled the company for two years before banning editing in mid-February. A detective work, the result of which shows that the improvements introduced after the scandal surrounding the Wilke sausage factory worked, says the head of the food safety task force, Tobias Lackner. A major outbreak could have been prevented. Thanks to the increase in personnel, every single case of pathogenic listeria is now being investigated in Hesse. That is unique nationwide.

The Darmstadt team also got involved in the fall when three cases were reported in the Offenbach Clinic. And again in February, when another listeria infection occurred in the Markus Hospital in Frankfurt. When researching in Offenbach, she ended up in a dead end, says Beatrice Ladewig, who was in charge of the case in the RP. The Frankfurters, on the other hand, had also frozen salad from the patient’s food. Such so-called reserve samples are kept for a while so that they can be examined in the event of illness.

Listeria can develop if vegetables or fruit are cut a few days before. For healthy people, the health risk is low. However, RP expert Ladewig advises hospital kitchens against pre-cut salads. The more food is chopped up and the longer it takes to eat, the greater the risk, adds Lackner. At the same time, the EU has so far not seen the need to pay special attention to such companies. Only companies that handle animal products such as milk, meat or fish are subject to approval.

According to the consumer organization Foodwatch, the Hessian consumer protection minister Priska Hinz (Greens) has not eliminated the weaknesses in food monitoring after the Wilke scandal. The political will to protect people from unsafe food is still lacking. “It needs an independent state institute for food control that is equipped with sufficient staff and has to publish all control results.”

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