Food poisoning kills woman and child, hits hundreds at Iraqi camp

ERBIL, Iraq (Reuters) – A woman and a child died and hundreds fell ill in a mass outbreak of food poisoning at a camp for displaced people east of the Iraqi city of Mosul, officials said.

More than 300 people were hospitalized after breaking their Ramadan fast with an iftar meal on Monday night, aid groups told Reuters.

Many started vomiting and some fainted after eating rice, chicken, yogurt and soup, said Iraqi lawmaker Zahed Khatoun, a member of the Iraqi parliament’s committee for displaced people.

“It is tragic that this happened to people who have gone through so much,” said Andrej Mahecic, from the U.N.’s refugee agency UNHCR, which runs the camp and 12 others in the war-torn area with Iraqi authorities.

Many of the camp residents had fled fighting around Mosul as Iraqi government forces and their allies press an offensive to push Islamic State militants out of the northern city.

The International Organization for Migration said a Qatari aid group had paid a local restaurant to provide the food for the meal, though that was not confirmed by other agencies.

“I don’t know the name of the restaurant, but that’s what our person on the site is reporting today,” IOM spokesman Joel Millman said in Geneva.

“We are told 312 were hospitalized … one child and one adult woman we’re told died,” he added.

The camp in al-Khazer, on the road linking Mosul and Erbil, the capital of the Kurdish region, houses 6,300 people, the UNHCR said.

About 800,000 people, more than a third of the pre-war population of Mosul, have already fled the city, seeking refuge with friends and relatives or in camps.

(Reporting by Maher Chmaytelli in Erbil and Stephanie Nebehay in Geneva; Editing by Andrew Heavens)

Farm Owners Whose Tainted Fruit Killed 33 Plead Guilty

Two Colorado men whose farm shipped tainted cantaloupes across the nation have pleaded guilty to multiple charges related to a food poisoning outbreak.

Eric and Ryan Jensen faced charges of adulteration of a food. They face up to six years in prison and $1.5 million in fines.

Jensen Farms shipped at least six shipments of cantaloupes in 2011 that were not sterilized allowing them to become infected with the listeria bacteria. The fruit sickened people from California to Virginia resulting in 33 deaths.

“The defendants have now admitted that they failed to protect the public from deadly bacteria on their cantaloupe, in violation of the law and critical USDA requirements,” U.S. Attorney John Walsh said in a statement.

The USDA had found the brothers installed a system at their farm to sterilize melons with a chlorine spray. The system, that was designed to be used to sterilize potatoes, was never put into service by the farm.

Sentencing for the two men is in January.