12.10.2015

ECDC

As of 8 October 2015, Austria is investigating an increase in the number of Salmonella Stanley cases reported since the beginning of the year. About 60% of the cases (141 cases of non-travel related infection ) were part of three clusters, of which two are occurring in Upper Austria and one in Tirol. Descriptive epidemiology and microbiological investigation strongly suggested turkey kebab as the source of at least 36 of these cases. Traceback analyses by national authorities identified that the implicated turkey meat distributed in the two outlets in Upper Austria and one in Tirol had been supplied by a single food retailer located in Slovakia. The turkey meat of the Slovakian retailer was suspected to originate from a turkey fattening and slaughtering facility in Hungary already involved in an Austrian S. Stanley cluster in 2014.
Molecular typing of isolates showed a PFGE pattern indistinguishable from the strain having caused the multi-country outbreak of S. Stanley infections in the European Union from August 2011 to January 2013, and clusters of cases in 2013 and 2014.