Prolonged multi‐country outbreak of Salmonella Strathcona ST2559 linked to consumption of tomatoes in the European Union/European Economic Area – first update, 23 October 2025
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract A prolonged cross‐border outbreak of Salmonella Strathcona ST2559 is ongoing in the European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA). From 2023 to 30 September 2025, 437 confirmed cases of S. Strathcona ST2559 were identified in 17 EU/EEA countries (205 additional cases since the first rapid outbreak assessment published on 12 November 2024): Austria (76), Croatia (3), Czechia (11), Denmark (12), Estonia (2), Finland (5), France (43), Germany (113), Ireland (6), Italy (123), Luxembourg (5), the Netherlands (5), Norway (4), Slovakia (6), Slovenia (10), Spain (3) and Sweden (10). Cases have also been reported in the United Kingdom (73), Canada (10) and the US (24). The most visited country among travel‐related cases was Italy. Tomatoes remain the primary food vehicle in several investigations for this prolonged multi‐country outbreak. In 2025, new outbreak investigations in Austria identified small tomatoes from Sicily (Italy) as the source of infection, as was the case for the 2023 outbreak in Austria and the 2024 outbreak in Italy. The same conclusion was reached for a historical S. Strathcona ST2559 outbreak in Denmark in 2011. In response, comprehensive investigations have been carried out by the food safety authority in Italy. The detection of S. Strathcona in a sample of irrigation water collected at the site of a tomato producer in Sicily confirmed the role of the environment in tomato contamination. These findings also highlighted the need for a multi‐disciplinary strategy integrating environmental assessments to mitigate the risk of Salmonella contamination. This need is also confirmed by the detection of the outbreak strain in other matrices connected with aquatic environments. To prevent new cases from occurring, further investigations should be undertaken to verify whether tomatoes from Sicily are the vehicle of infection and to guide effective control measures during the (pre)harvest period, including irrigation water sources.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".