These are broken families. An 8-year-old boy who died in Paris after a severe hemolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS). A 12-year-old girl in a vegetative state, unresponsive to stimuli from those around her. A newborn baby died eight hours after birth. A 7-year-old child who had several cardiac arrests. Others have come close to the worst, like this family whose three children, aged 2, 9 and 10, were hospitalized in emergency between the end of January and the beginning of February and today have sequelae.
These tragedies have in common to have occurred a few days after the consumption of Fraîch’Up pizzas from Buitoni produced in the same Nestlé factory. The analyzes showed that they were contaminated with bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli).
A preliminary investigation was opened on March 22 by the public health department of the Paris prosecutor’s office, in particular for “endangering others, involuntary injury and manslaughter”and Wednesday, April 13, searches were carried out by the gendarmes of the Central Office for the fight against damage to the environment and public health at the headquarters of Nestlé in Issy-les-Moulineaux (Hauts-de-Seine) , at the Caudry plant (Nord) and at several other sites.
The Public Health Agency France, whose investigations carried out with the Pasteur Institute have confirmed the link between the occurrence of clustered cases of HUS and the consumption of Buitoni pizzas, had identified, as of April 13, fifty-three confirmed cases, including two deceased children, and was investigating twenty-six others. Lawyer Pierre Debuisson, who defends around forty families of victims, considers the reaction time too slow: “The first hospitalizations occurred in January and the factory’s production lines were not closed until March 18. The products were allowed to flow and other children to be contaminated. »
DNA verdict
The Nestlé group, for its part, has closed the hatches. Officially, the Swiss giant no longer wishes to speak because of the ongoing legal proceedings. “This is a step that is part of the investigation. We continue to cooperate fully with the authorities to ensure its smooth running. At this stage, we are unable to share more information. We wish to reaffirm that the safety and quality of our products are our first priorities”, he just says.
The Caudry factory halted its production activity on March 18, the same day a press release was sent announcing the pizza recall. A decision made “after being informed of the presence of bacteria E. coli in the dough of a frozen pizza from the Fraîch’Up range”. Only the Buitoni brand appears on this press release, which does not mention its owner, Nestlé. The Italian company Buitoni, which built the Caudry site in 1982, no longer exists. It was bought in 1988 by the Swiss group, which ultimately only kept the frozen pizza business.
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