More than 120 people have had to consult medical services in Moscow in recent days, 30 of whom are still in intensive care, after serious food poisoning with suspected botulism, municipal authorities announced on Monday. Questioned by the Health Surveillance Agency (Rospotrebnadzor), salads sold by a company delivering home-cooked meals were withdrawn from sale.
“At present, 55 people are in serious condition, including 30 in intensive care” out of a total of 121 poisoned individuals “presenting symptoms of poisoning and suspected botulism,” said Anastassia Rakova, the deputy of the mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin. “The lives of these patients are not threatened,” she said, quoted by Russian news agencies.
Foodborne botulism is “a serious and potentially fatal but rare disease” that “blocks nerve functions and can lead to respiratory and muscular paralysis,” explains the World Health Organization (WHO) on its website. This poisoning is caused by the ingestion of botulinum toxins, present in contaminated food.
Ms. Rakova said that “the city of Moscow and the regional Ministry of Health have identified the main products that could be the cause of the food poisoning.”
The home-cooked meal delivery company, which sells the salads in question, said in a statement that it had “already withdrawn the dish from sale and started checking the entire supply and production chain” . “We have also temporarily stopped the application (editor’s note: mobile) to check all products, even those which do not pose a problem,” she said.
According to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control, only 82 cases of botulism were confirmed in the European Economic Area (EEA) in 2021, the latest year for which data has been published.
