Latest news with #Cosenza
The Sun
09-08-2025
- Health
- The Sun
Man killed and nine rushed to hospital as BROCCOLI recalled across Italy in deadly outbreak
A MAN has died after taking a fatal bite of a broccoli and sausage sandwich amid a growing botulism outbreak. Broccoli has now been recalled in Italy after nine others were hospitalised with similar symptoms after eating the same meal from a food truck. 2 2 Luigi Di Sarno, 52, died on Thursday after eating the sandwich from a street vendor on the Diamante seafront in the province of Cosenza. Di Sarno's family also fell ill as they were all rushed to Annunziata Hospital in Cosenza including two 17-year-olds and two women in their 40s. Two of the patients were reportedly in a serious condition when they arrived at the intensive care unit. They were all showing signs of botulism linked to the popular green vegetable. Botulism is a rare condition which can often be life-threatening and is caused by toxins produced by Clostridium botulinum bacteria. Following the outbreak in the Cosenza area, The Paola Public Prosecutor's Office immediately ordered the seizure of jars of broccoli in oil, according to local media. The food truck where the sandwiches were made has also been seized with an investigation launched into the spread of the toxin. .
Daily Mail
08-08-2025
- Health
- Daily Mail
Broccoli is recalled across Italy after one man is killed and nine people are hospitalised in botulism outbreak
Broccoli has been recalled across Italy after one man was killed and nine people were hospitalised after eating a sandwich at a food truck amid a growing botulism outbreak. Luigi Di Sarno, 52, died on Thursday after purchasing a broccoli and sausage sandwich from a street vendor on the Diamante seafront in the province of Cosenza. Nine others were hospitalised with similar symptoms after eating the same meal, including several members of Di Sarno's family. The individuals being treated in Annunziata Hospital in Cosenza include two 17-year-olds and two women in their 40s. Two of the patients were reportedly in a serious condition when they arrived at the intensive care unit. All exhibit symptoms of botulism, a rare but life-threatening condition caused by toxins produced by Clostridium botulinum bacteria. Following the outbreak in the Cosenza area, the Paola Public Prosecutor's Office has ordered the immediate seizure of a commercial product, understood to be jars of broccoli in oil. The food truck in question has also been seized and an investigation has been opened into the spread of the toxin. Vials of 'antitoxin serum' to treat the botulism are being rapidly flown across Italy to address the emergency in Cosenza and treat patients. Calabria Region's Department of Health and Welfare said: 'The emergency procedure established in these cases has been activated, which requires immediate notification to the Poison Control Center in Pavia, the only national centre designated for the management of botulism. 'No region or hospital in the country is authorised to store the antivenom in their own facilities. This serum, however, is exclusively available to the Ministry of Health, which holds it in designated secure locations and distributes it only through the Lombardy Poison Control Centre. 'The first two vials, used for the first patients, were sent directly from the Military Pharmacy in Taranto. However, as the number of cases increased, additional supplies became necessary. 'Yesterday, the Calabria Region, through Azienda Zero, provided a 118 aircraft that flew to the San Camillo Hospital in Rome, where the ministry had centralised additional vials of the antivenom to facilitate distribution.' Seven more vials of the serum were delivered to the affected region by air ambulance, 'one for injection and six as a reserve'. Di Sarno, an artist and musician originally from Cercola, in the province of Naples, was on holiday in Calabria with his family. After they ate the sandwich on the Tyrrhenian coast of Cosenza, he began driving back home to Naples. On the way, on the highway near Lagonegro in Potenza, the 52-year-old fell ill. His health deteriorated, and he died in the small town in Basilicata on Thursday before reaching the San Giovanni Hospital in Lagonegro. The judiciary has ordered an autopsy to determine the cause of death but local media suspect it was botulism. The infected broccoli comes just days after eight people reportedly fell ill with botulism after eating infected guacamole at a festival in Sardinia from July 22 to 24. An 11-year-old boy remains hospitalised in intensive care at the Gemelli Polyclinic in Rome, after being transferred by helicopter from the Brotzu Hospital in Cagliari for poisoning contracted during the Fiesta Latina in Monserrato, La Repubblica reports. A 38-year-old woman who also ate a taco with guacamole at a kiosk at the festival in the Cagliari hinterland has reportedly died after her condition worsened in hospital. The travelling festival was on its way to Tortolì but has now been suspended by local authorities. The Cagliari Public Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation into the incident and a recall notice, published by the Ministry of Health, was reportedly issued for Metro Chef avocado pulp because of the possible presence of botulinum toxin. The office, led by Chief Prosecutor Domenico Fiordalisi, is also investigating another crime related to the sale of harmful foods and medical liability in the handling of the case, reported the Corriere del Mezzogiorno newspaper.
The Independent
09-07-2025
- Automotive
- The Independent
Highway workers rescued after getting into difficulty on busy motorway viaduct
Twelve highway workers have been rescued after getting stuck on elevating platforms during maintenance work on the pillars of the Friddizza viaduct in Italy. Footage posted by Vigili del Fuoco shows the workers being brought down from two elevating platforms using ladders and ropes on Tuesday afternoon (8 July). 'The #SAF unit from the #Cosenza command brought them safely back to the ground,' Vigili del Fuoco wrote. The Friddizza viaduct is located on the Mediterranean motorway in Italy, in the province of Cosenza near the town of Dipignano.
The Herald Scotland
12-05-2025
- Politics
- The Herald Scotland
What Italy's ultra movement can tell us about Scottish scene
To help understand where the burgeoning ultras scene in Scotland has come from, then, and where it may lead, it is natural to look to the country where the concept was birthed, and where it thrives to this day. Few understand the Italian ultras scene better than author Tobias Jones, an Englishman who moved to the country initially in 1999 and then went back there after some years back home to settle into family life in Parma. A few years ago, though, his long-held fascination with sub-cultures led him into a very different world, as he embedded himself into the matchday rituals of the ultras group affiliated to Cosenza – a relatively small and unheralded club from the south of the country. (Image: Rob Casey - SNS Group) The choice was rooted in a desire to offer a counterbalance to the old tropes about ultras groups – their sympathies for fascistic ideology, the violence (murders, even) and drug-dealing - which are nonetheless an undeniable and integral part of their story. Cosenza, by contrast, were steadfastly anti-fascist, and were known instead as altruistic, providing shelter to the destitute or to immigrants and charity to those in need. The result was his illuminating 2019 book, Ultra: The Underworld of Italian Football, a fascinating and unflinching account of the birth of the ultras movement in Italy, what they evolved to become, warts and all. But at its heart is the notion that this is not one homogenous movement at all, but groups for whom the love of their own town or city – their 'caput mundi', or capital of the world - is just as important as their disdain for the others. 'Being an ultra, much of it's a common human anthropological thing that when people form groups, they have enemies, that's the way it goes,' Jones said. 'Almost immediately when the 'ultra' was born around 1967, '68, you have the Years of Lead in Italy. You have the extremist political terrorism from far right and far left. So, that's a sort of a context that is unique. 'Once where there were insults, those became beatings that became death, there was this sort of revenge mechanism that was always upping the ante. If you've got a martyr that needs to be avenged, it keeps ratcheting up. So, from fistfights you go to knife fights and from knife fights to gunfights. 'I see the Italian ones very sort of embedded in what happened here. So, the shift to the far right amongst the ultras is so clearly connected to the end of the Soviet Union, the sort of discrediting of communism, if that's what it was, and the rise of mass immigration into a country that when I first came in, you never really saw one black or brown face. You've got geopolitical things happening that mean that the terraces take a very large rightward step. 'Here, you obviously had Inter, Lazio and Verona and then lots of lesser-known teams like Ascoli who've always been notoriously aligned to the right. And other ones, not necessarily well-known teams, but Livorno, Genoa etc that were more to the left. (Image: Rob Casey - SNS Group) 'I've often wondered how the sectarian element enters into it in Glasgow, but that's not something that was there in a mono-faith country like Italy, which was almost ubiquitously Catholic in the 60s and 70s. 'How that plays out, I don't know. It'll be interesting to see over the coming years or decades.' The notion of knife fights or gun fights playing out on Scottish streets may seem a frightening one, and after the running battles between the Green Brigade and the Union Bears in Glasgow city centre prior to the New Year derby, not all that much of a stretch to imagine. The police response to that incident – the exercising of additional powers to search fans prior to the next match between the sides at Celtic Park and the kettling of supporters outside the ground – sparked a subsequent protest at the London Road police station over the heavy-handedness of fan policing. In Italy, the response from the authorities was on a different level altogether, meeting the escalating seriousness of what they were dealing with, but as Jones explains, the common thread of suppression runs through the psyche of ultras from Celtic's North Curve to Inter's Curva Nord, and strained relations with the police are a given. 'Calling the police response heavy-handed is sort of an understatement,' he said. 'The D.I.G.O.S. [Divisione Investigazioni Generali e Operazioni Speciali], the division that deals with fans, is not commonly associated with light-handedness. 'And as always, as in ultra-on-ultra violence, ultra-on-police violence, the one thing that will unite the whole ultras movement is this notion that they are the suppressed, subjugated underdog. That's natural when you have fans repeatedly dying in custody, and then also fans being shot across the motorway like Gabriele Sandri, the Lazio fan whose picture is up everywhere. 'And then you get also a policeman killed in Catania, (Filippo) Raciti. So, you know, it's incremental, this bit-by-bit increase of fear and distrust. 'And then the other thing they did, which was incredibly strategic and split down the centre of the whole movement, was the fans' identity card. You couldn't go to either at-risk games or away games, or sometimes you couldn't even get into your home stadium, unless you had it. 'I talk about it in the book that half the fans said, 'Well, look, what's the difference? We've got to go to the stadium.' It's like not going to church. And other people would go a thousand miles to stand outside the stadium and sing from there as a protest. It's down the middle. And as you know, if you split the opposition, you're halfway there.' To draw alarmist conclusions from the ultras story in Italy though when considering the future of the Scottish equivalent is, Jones feels, too simplistic. (Image: Craig Foy - SNS Group) 'There are sides of the way that they support a football team here that I can't really see being imported quickly to Scotland,' he said. 'I hope, for instance, that the real violence and drug dealing remains outside the ultras scene. I think when the head of a gang is earning tens of thousands a month, people fight for that kind of money. I don't get the impression, I might be wrong, that your groups there have got huge income streams. 'It's obviously linked to touting and all the stuff like the burger concessions, the parking concessions, sort of the petty criminal, mafia context around the curtilage of stadiums that mean that the ultras can get into those positions. And also, obviously, proper wholesale narco-trafficking. 'Here, it's extremely hierarchical. So, the one man with a megaphone decides what everyone sings. When I go to a stadium in Britain, it feels a lot more spontaneous and there's a lot of humour. Whereas here, it's kind of quite serious and frowning. You know, the next song on the hymn sheet is this. 'I say this in a good way, Scotland just feels more anarchic than Italy, which is actually quite traditionalist and conformist in unexpected ways. I just wonder whether that sort of make-up of an ultras group that is strategical, politicised, hierarchical, maybe that's not the way it'll grow in a very different country.' Might it instead, in Scotland, follow the path of what Jones describes in his book as 'the more idealistic origins of the movement' that he found were still largely the guiding principles of the ultras in Cosenza, such as charity. They may be politicised and from differing sides of that spectrum, but almost all of the ultras groups operating in Scotland collect for their local foodbanks, and try to be seen as a force for good within their communities, a common trait with their Italian counterparts. 'The first thing on the other side of the charge sheet against the ultras is that any time there's a flood, an earthquake, a drought, a natural disaster, a man-made disaster, it's always the ultras on the front line,' he said. 'Partly because the Italian state is not so nimble, it's often very slow to respond, but the ultras are always on the front line. 'I followed Cosenza for three years because they were the most altruistic of all ultras, I think. They were occupying hotels confiscated from the Mafia, opening them up to immigrants, doing distribution of food to the homeless, doing evenings of five-a-side football matches for young kids who couldn't afford a pitch, all sorts of things that again fill the gap in modern society where there are many, many holes in the safety net.' Just as the ultras groups fill the holes society fails to in many lives. If there are lessons to be drawn then from the Italian experience when it comes to the way Scotland's ultras scene may evolve, it is that being dismissive or wholly condemnatory of them is a dangerous game, and a stance that may allow nefarious actors to fill those voids in the lives of many of them. 'I think the warning sign isn't about ultras, but about the wider society,' he said. 'Where do vulnerable, excluded young men - because it's normally men, but women as well – find belonging and meaning and rootedness? And actually, if they find it in a football team, is it that bad a place to find it? (Image: SNS Group) 'If there aren't movements that create family and tribe and fun, if a football team can't do it, where the heck are young kids in the 21st century going to find belonging and meaning? 'So, I think the warning is actually if it's demonised and we're told from the off they're idiots we shouldn't listen to - which I think is how the ultras movement was scorned by the intellectual left in Italy in the 80s and the 90s, they started turning their back on it, saying these guys are a bunch of idiots - it created this vacuum that the far-right moved into. So, I see that as the main warning. 'But I think - and I'm guessing here, but I hope – [the Scottish ultras movement] is perhaps a reflection of that really fascinating bond between Scotland and Italy. So, whether it's because of industry, prisoners of war, shipbuilding, food or so many other things, there is this amazing link between the countries. 'I get the sense that's kind of what a lot of Scottish groups feel. You know, they're doing something that's a bit Italian. And that obviously is a great thing, because it's a lovely country.'
