What to Know
If you’re living in the United States, you’ve probably grown accustomed to hearing about food recalls you need to watch out for due to things like salmonella and cyclosphora outbreaks. It may feel like they’re happening every other day. Unfortunately, these types of things can also happen in other parts of the world and cause serious health issues that can also lead to death.
A thirteen-year-old boy has died nine years after eating a piece of cheese that was contaminated with E. coli bacteria. Tragically, he was in a permanent vegetative state for nine years starting at age 4 after never recovering from eating raw milk cheese in Italy.
A teen dies after eating contaminated cheese that left him in a vegetative state for nearly a decade.
According to The Mirror UK, nine years after eating some cheese that was contaminated with deadly E.coli bacteria, 13-year-old Mattia Maestri has died. In June 2017, when he was just a 4-year-old boy, he ate some raw-milk cheese in the northern part of Italy that completely altered the rest of his life.
After consuming the contaminated cheese, Mattia was left in a coma after a rare strain of shiga toxin-producing E.Coli (or STEC) triggered haemolytic uremic syndrome, which is life-threatening and can lead to kidney failure, The Sun UK reported.
Mattia’s father, Giovanni Battista Maestri announced the news of his son’s death in a message published by the newspaper II Corriere del Trentino, per The Mirror UK. “Our Mattia has left us and, on his behalf, I thank you for helping to make his passing less painful,” he said.
After everything, this must have been such a devastating loss for the family.
After his son’s grave diagnosis, the family fought to let other parents know about the dangers of unpasterized dairy.
Ever since he contracted E. coli, Mattia’s family has been fighting a legal battle against those responsible, per The Mirror UK. They’ve been looking at both the cheese factory and the healthcare workers who were in charge of Mattia’s care.
The cheese that Mattia consumed was produced from raw milk by the Coredo cheese dairy farm that’s located in the Non Valley of Trentino, Italy. Raw milk cheese doesn’t go through the typical heating pasteurization that kills most bacteria. Mattia’s father claims that the contamination happened due to errors in the milk collection process, The Mirror UK reported.
Common symptoms of an E. coli infection are diarrhea, stomach pains and cramps, loss of appetite, and low fever, per the Cleveland Clinic. It can be contracted by eating contaminated foods like raw meat, eating or drinking unpasterized foods, drinking contaminated water, and touching surfaces that are contaminated with feces.
According to The Sun UK, Giovanni founded a consumer group and has published a book in hopes of warning other families out there of the dangers of unpasterized milk products.
Sadly, he was not the first child to die from harmful E.coli bacteria.
Heartbreakingly, Mattia’s story is not the only one of its kind.
According to People, a 1-year-old girl from the UK named Ariella Mann has died after she contracted suspected E. coli while on a family vacation in Egypt. She fell ill while staying with her family at a 5-star resort in Hurghada and her condition worsened when she got back home.
Like Mattia, she had developed haemolytic uremic syndrome, which led to her death, per the magazine. Two other children who had stayed at that same hotel contracted E.coli but were able to recover.
In 2016, Time.com reported that a child died after an E. coli outbreak in Scotland that led to over 20 people falling ill after they ate some Dunsyre Blue cheese.
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