The Yemeni Ministry of Agriculture has warned consumers against eating Egyptian frozen strawberries, ordering their withdrawal from local markets and their destruction, and banning their import.

The Ministry of Agriculture has reached this decision after research staff took samples from Egyptian strawberries distributed to Yemeni markets last December which turned out to be contaminated with hepatitis A.

It had already been announced that Jordan, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia and Japan, in addition to the United States, were enforcing tighter controls over Egyptian agricultural commodities, in the wake of the US report that noted that some Egyptian crops caused hepatitis. only recently have Kuwait and Saudi Arabia softened their restrictions on the import of Egyptian agricultural products.

The crisis started in September 2016, when the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention announced that 89 people had been infected with hepatitis A in seven US states after consuming frozen strawberries from Egypt.

According to sources of the Agricultural Research Corporation consulted by The New Arab, the Egyptian samples of frozen strawberries were tested in private laboratories and contamination of hepatitis A virus was discovered on 60% of the samples.