Up to twelve alerts has set off Italy on account of the Galician mussel since the start of the year. The last one was yesterday. And that was so due to the detection of E. coli (Escherichia coli) at above the allowable level in several consignments of bivalve molluscs sent from Spain.
According to the reports from Italian health authorities to the rapid alert system for food and feed (RASFF), some of the intercepted mussels doubled, tripled and even showed a seven-fold increase of the legal limit allowed of fecal coliform because there were alarms that detected levels amounting to 490, 700 and even 1,700 E. coli per hundred grams of meat, when the legally allowed limit is 230. There is no evidence that the product has reached the market and caused poisoning among consumers and in most cases the problem was solved with the purification of the product, or with the retention of the bivalve mollusc before reaching the market.
FoodWorld 