Listeriosis death toll up to 61

MINISTER of Health Aaron Motsoaledi yesterday said that the death toll from South Africa’s listeriosis outbreak had risen from 36 to 61 in just over a month.

The number of cases confirmed via lab testing had increased from 557 to 727 in the same period, he added.

Motsoaledi said that even though more cases were confirmed in labo the department was still a long way off from tracing all patients as well as the source of the latest outbreak.

“Now out of the total of 727 laboratorycases which we know about‚ we are only able to trace 134 actual patients‚ which is only 18%. This means that we still have a long way to go in searching. Out of the 134 traced patients‚ 61 had passed on‚” said Motsoaledi.

He said the department had taken a number of measures to fight the outbreak‚ including declaring listeriosis a notifiable condition for the first time in history‚ conducting genome sequencing analysis on samples as well as checking with potential source areas that hygiene bylines were followed.

He said as a precaution environmental health practitioners visited Sovereign Foods’ abattoir to collect food samples.

While these samples had not picked up the ST6 strain‚ the tests found other strains with the potential to cause disease.

“At this juncture‚ we cannot conclude that the abattoir called Sovereign Foods is the source of the present outbreak‚” he said.

Sovereign Foods‚ which is based in the Eastern Cape‚ is one of the major poultry producers in Africa. — DDC