Cherry Tomato Outbreak Reaches 437 Cases Across 17 European Countries

The prolonged outbreak linked to cherry tomatoes cultivated in Sicily accumulated 437 confirmed cases between January 2023 and September 2025 across 17 European countries, plus the United Kingdom, United States and Canada, according to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Italy recorded the highest number of cases with 123, followed by Germany with 112 and Austria with 76. Following the emergence of new cases with no recent travel history to Italy, the European Commission requested an updated risk assessment of the outbreak in September 2025.

The fact that the outbreak crossed not only European borders but also the Atlantic, reaching the United States and Canada, confirms the global scale that contamination of fresh agricultural products can achieve: once contaminated cherry tomatoes from Sicily enter international distribution chains, the outbreak ceases to be a regional Italian problem and becomes a surveillance event spanning at least twenty distinct countries.

Contamination was traced to irrigation water used in tomato cultivation, explaining why the outbreak persisted intermittently over more than two years: if the contaminated water source persists from season to season, each new harvest risks repeating the same surface contamination pattern on a product consumed raw and unpeeled.

This scale—437 cases across twenty countries over two and a half years—confirms that microbiological quality control of irrigation water in export vegetable cultivation is not an optional verification point, but the variable determining whether an agricultural-origin outbreak remains confined to a local market or becomes a multi-continent surveillance event.