Bacteria E. coli: How Pizzas Buitoni were dismissed by health authorities

It is at the end of a real police investigation that this preparation has been incriminated in the renal impairment epidemic which, since the beginning of the year, killed two children or adolescents and touched dozens of others in metropolitan France.

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Wednesday, March 30, France (SPF) confirmed the link – suspected since mid-March – between the consumption of frozen pizzas Buitoni and several dozens of serious infections, in children and adolescents, who killed two of them. Twelve Regions are affected: Hauts-de-France, New Aquitaine, Pays de la Loire, Ile-de-France, Brittany, Grand East, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Center-Val de Loire, Provence-Alpes-Côte d Azur, Burgundy-Franche-Comté, Normandy and Occitania.

It is, in fact, a very unusual epidemic of food infections, hemolytic and uremic syndromes (Shu), which has been rampant in metropolitan France since the beginning of the year. Each year, approximately 160 HSU cases are notified to SPF, which has set up a monitoring device for this disease since 1996. Often bloody diarrhea, abdominal pain and sometimes vomiting: 3 to 10 days after contamination, these symptoms appear and After a week, can evolve, after renal insufficiency. Great fatigue, pallor, decreased volume of urine, which become darker, and sometimes convulsions are then the warning signs. Support, hospital, is based on blood transfusions and / or dialysis. About 10% of children reached make a severe form.

In the child, this syndrome is most often due to a bacterium Escherichia coli. Once ingested, this infectious germ frees its toxins into the digestive tract, where they will destroy the intestinal cells. These toxins also gain the bloodstream, which transports them to the small arteries of the kidneys. There, they create “breches, explains Matthieu Jamme, nephrologist and resuscitator doctor, in a tweet. These breaches will be clogged” but their repair causes narrowing, or even occlusion, small renal arteries.

The kidneys, whose oxygen supply is apparent, start to dysfunction. Hence the renal insufficiency “which, if it is not treated quickly, will be responsible for an accumulation of waste in the blood that can be responsible for a cardiac arrest,” adds Mammeu Jamme. Without going to this end, “30% of patients who make severe forms retain renal sequelae,” says Professor François-Xavier Weill, Head of the Institut Pasteur Institute Pathogenic Bacteria Unit. In case of suggestive symptoms, you must immediately consult a doctor.

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/Media reports.