Latest on E. coli outbreak: More than 1500 people in Germany infected, 16 killed

[MNeagle]

Latest on E. coli outbreak: More than 1500 people in Germany infected, 16 killed; cases reported in 7 other countries



http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15118081,00.html

Blame game begins over German E. coli outbreak


The highly virulent strain of the Enterohemorrhagic E. coli bacteria (EHEC) claimed its first victim outside Germany on Tuesday, while health authorities in seven other European countries confirmed a total of at least 73 cases of the infection. More than 1,500 cases have been reported in Germany.

A hospital in Sweden announced the death of a woman from the EHEC bacteria. The woman, who was in her 50s, had been treated in the southwestern Swedish town of Boras after a recent visit to Germany.

The gastro-intestinal bacterial infection - believed to stem from contaminated vegetables and possibly meat - has now spread beyond Germany and Sweden to Poland, Denmark, Norway, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France and Britain.

Sweden has confirmed 40 cases, Denmark 14, the Netherlands seven, France six, Britain three and Poland, Norway and Switzerland one each.

On Sunday, a 91-year-old woman in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany died from the intestinal bacteria, and the state confirmed a second death on Monday.

This brings the total number of victims who have died from the recent E. coli outbreak in Germany to at least 15. Most of the victims have been women living in northern Germany.

Tensions rise as outbreak spreads

The source of the deadly E. coli strain was thought to be cucumbers imported from Spain, but tests on the vegetable done by the Hamburg Health Department have ruled this out and the search for the source of the infections continues.

The outbreak, one of the largest of its kind, has raised diplomatic tensions between Germany and the EU. Moscow has banned some vegetable imports and is threatening to extend the ban to the whole of the European Union.

Spanish media has reported that Germany, Denmark, the Czech Republic, Luxembourg, Hungary, Sweden, Belgium and Russia were blocking entry of Spanish cucumbers. The United States said it was also testing cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce imported from Spain.

Madrid has rejected German claims that its cucumbers were to blame for the epidemic and has asked the European Union for aid to compensate for what it said was already extensive damage to its agriculture sector.

"The image of Spain is being ruined; Spanish producers are being damaged, and the Spanish government is not prepared to accept this situation," Agriculture Minister Rosa Aguilar said.

On the sidelines of an EU farm ministers meeting in Hungary, German State Secretary for Agriculture, Robert Kloos, admitted that Spanish cucumbers were "not the cause" of the infections.

The Netherlands said exports of cucumbers to Germany, its most important market, had all but halted, costing its farmers millions of euros.

Infection not over

Officials from the state and federal governments of Germany are working feverishly to limit the political fallout from the deepening E.coli crisis, but said they were "back at square one" after realizing that Spanish vegetables were not the cause.

The source remains a mystery and German Health Minister Daniel Bahr said there were indications that the source was still active.

"The result is that we are unfortunately going to be dealing with a rise in the number of cases," Bahr said in a news conference after a crisis meeting.

France has criticized the lack of progress, with French Health Minister Xavier Bertrand demanding greater transparency from Germany and Spain.

The German Consumer Affairs Minister Ilse Aigner said the situation was serious and was "a matter of life and death."

"Consumer protection has the highest priority," she added.

Germany's national disease control center, the Robert Koch Institute, has advised against eating raw cucumbers, tomatoes and lettuce, especially if these vegetables were purchased in northern Germany.

The Stockholm-based European Center for Disease Prevention and Control has described the outbreak of the strain of E. coli as one of the largest worldwide.

[keehah]

Further South...

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/229397-Saudi-Arabia-Mystery-disease-kills-300-sheep-within-an-hour

Sat, 28 May 2011 00:00 CDT
A Saudi farmer who went into his barn to take his 300 sheep on their daily pasturing was shocked when he found them all dead, a newspaper in the Gulf Kingdom said on Saturday.

The farm said he checked the sheep an hour earlier and they were all alive in their barn at his far in the western town of Qunfudha.

[Dogman]

With the government cutting back on food inspections here, what is now bad (one or more outbreaks a year) expect things to get worse.

And that strain of E-coli WILL make it to our shores! There is not a dammed tinkers chance in hell that it can be stopped.

[keehah]

'Normal' E.coli are not toxic themselves, just a good indicator species of animal feces.

A strain with a toxin creating aggressive human zombies?!?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,765777,00.html

The eeriest thing of all, according to Rolf Stahl, is the way patients change. "Their awareness becomes blurred, they have problems finding words and they don't quite know where they are," says Stahl. And then there is this surprising aggressiveness. "We are dealing with a completely new clinical picture," he notes.

Stahl, a 62-year-old kidney specialist, has been the head of the Third Medical Clinic and Polyclinic at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) for almost 18 years. "But none of us doctors has ever experienced anything quite like this," he says. His staff has been working around the clock for the last week or so. "We decide at short notice who can go and get some sleep."

The bacterium that is currently terrifying the country is an enterohemorrhagic strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli (EHEC), a close relative of harmless intestinal bacteria, but one that produces the dangerous Shiga toxin. All it takes is about 100 bacteria -- which isn't much in the world of bacteria, which are normally counted by the millions -- to become infected. After an incubation period of two to 10 days, patients experience watery or bloody diarrhea.

[Dogman]

Normally E.coli are not toxic themselves, just a good indicator species of animal feces. Its as if 'normal' E. coli was modified to make a toxic and agressive to make human zombies?!?

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,765777,00.html

The eeriest thing of all, according to Rolf Stahl, is the way patients change. "Their awareness becomes blurred, they have problems finding words and they don't quite know where they are," says Stahl. And then there is this surprising aggressiveness. "We are dealing with a completely new clinical picture," he notes.

Stahl, a 62-year-old kidney specialist, has been the head of the Third Medical Clinic and Polyclinic at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE) for almost 18 years. "But none of us doctors has ever experienced anything quite like this," he says. His staff has been working around the clock for the last week or so. "We decide at short notice who can go and get some sleep."

The bacterium that is currently terrifying the country is an enterohemorrhagic strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli (EHEC), a close relative of harmless intestinal bacteria, but one that produces the dangerous Shiga toxin. All it takes is about 100 bacteria -- which isn't much in the world of bacteria, which are normally counted by the millions -- to become infected. After an incubation period of two to 10 days, patients experience watery or bloody diarrhea.



E. coli can self mutate in the normal scheme of things, But yes the military has played with it also, and what they have in their bag of tricks, at least what is known, is very scary.

[keehah]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Escherichia_coli_O104:H4_outbreak

An ongoing Escherichia coli O104:H4 bacterial outbreak began in Germany in May 2011.

The outbreak started after several people were infected with bacteria leading to hemolytic-uremic syndrome in Germany, apparently after eating contaminated cucumbers. German officials initially pointed to contaminated cucumbers originating in Spain as the source of the outbreak, but later recognised that Spanish cucumbers were not the source of the E. coli. Spain has expressed anger at unsubstantiated German links being made between Spanish cucumbers and the deadly E. coli outbreak.

In addition to Germany, where the outbreak is the worst, cases have also been reported in several countries including Switzerland, Poland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, the United Kingdom and the USA.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escherichia_coli_O104:H4

Escherichia coli O104:H4 is a rare enterohemorrhagic strain of the bacterium Escherichia coli, and the cause of the 2011 Escherichia coli O104:H4 outbreak. The "O" in the serological classification identifies the cell wall lipopolysaccharide antigen, and the "H" identifies the flagella antigen.

Prior to the 2011 outbreak, only one case had been documented in literature, and this case was a woman in Korea in 2005.[1]

^ Bae WK, Lee YK, Cho MS, Ma SK, Kim SW, Kim NH, et al.. A case of haemolytic uremic syndrome caused by Escherichia coli O104:H4. Yonsei Medical Journal. 2006 Jun 30;47(3):473–9. doi:10.3349/ymj.2006.47.3.437. PMID 16807997

[po boy]

I haven't caught e-coli from the home garden yet.

[Cebu_4_2]

Will colloidal silver help with something like this?

[ShortJohnSilver]

Will colloidal silver help with something like this?


Best solution for ecoli before you eat it is to either not eat it, clean it again, or, in the case of ground meat, add some garlic salt or powder to the meat.

I would assume colloidal silver would work well, garlic too when taken raw is supposed to be quite good.

[lapis]

Notice you keep seeing variations on these phrases in relation to this problem:

"The source remains a mystery"

"Smoking gun elusive in E.coli breakout"

That is total b.s.

The smoking gun and unmysterious source is factory farming! It's just a huge, disgusting problem.

[keehah]

Hamburgers!

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/06/02/ap/world/main20068222.shtml

(AP) LONDON (AP) — The E. coli bacteria responsible for a deadly outbreak that has left 18 dead and sickened hundreds in Europe is a new strain that has never been seen before, the World Health Organization said Thursday.

Preliminary genetic sequencing suggests the strain is a mutant form of two different E. coli bacteria, with aggressive genes that could explain why the Europe-wide outbreak appears to be so massive and dangerous, the agency said.

Hilde Kruse, a food safety expert at the WHO, told The Associated Press that "this is a unique strain that has never been isolated from patients before."

She added that the new strain has "various characteristics that make it more virulent and toxin-producing" than the many E. coli strains people naturally carry in their intestines.

...Researchers have been unable to pinpoint the cause of the illness, which has hit at least nine European countries, and prompted Russia on Thursday to extend a ban on vegetables to the entire European Union.

...Previous E. coli outbreaks have mainly hit children and the elderly, but the European outbreak is disproportionately affecting adults, especially women. Kruse said there might be something particular about the bacteria strain that makes it more dangerous for adults.

But she cautioned that since people with milder cases probably aren't seeking medical help, officials don't know just how big the outbreak is. "It's hard to say how virulent (this new E. coli strain) is because we just don't know the real number of people affected."

Nearly all the sick people either live in Germany or recently traveled there. Two people who were sickened are now in the United States, and both had recently traveled to Hamburg, Germany, where many of the infections occurred.

...He said the number of new cases would likely slow to a trickle in the next few days. The incubation period for this type of E. coli is about three to eight days, and most people recover within 10 days.

...The United Arab Emirates issued a temporary ban on cucumbers from Spain, Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands. State news agency WAM said the Gulf nation's Minister of Environment and Water issued the order based on information "from international food safety agencies and news reports."

Meanwhile, Spain's prime minister slammed the European Commission and Germany for early on singling out the country's produce as a possible source of the outbreak, and said the government would demand explanations and reparations.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told Spanish National Radio that the German federal government was ultimately responsible for the allegations, adding that Spain would seek "conclusive explanations and sufficient reparations."

The outbreak is already considered the third-largest involving E. coli in recent world history, and it may be the deadliest. Twelve people died in a 1996 Japanese outbreak that reportedly sickened more than 9,000, and seven died in a 2000 Canadian outbreak.

[Dogman]

http://www.thestreet.com/story/11141058/1/e-coli-outbreak-caused-by-new-super-toxic-strain.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN
(http://www.thestreet.com/story/11141058/1/e-coli-outbreak-caused-by-new-super-toxic-strain.html?cm_ven=GOOGLEN)


E. Coli Outbreak Caused by 'New Super-Toxic' Strain


NEW YORK (TheStreet) -- The World Health Organization said Thursday that the E. coli outbreak, which has left 18 dead across Europe and sparked threats of a legal feud between Spain and Germany, is a strain never seen before.
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The deadly E. coli "is a unique strain that has never been isolated from patients before," Hilde Kruse, a food safety expert told The Associated Press.

More than 1,500 illnesses and at least 18 deaths linked to the outbreak have been reported in Germany, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France and numerous other European nations. But the WHO said it are not certain where the problem originated, nor what caused it.

A Chinese laboratory that tested the strain along with German scientists called it a "new super-toxic E. coli strain."

Enterohaemorrhagic E. coli is a bacterium commonly found in human stomachs, and is transmitted through consumption of contaminated foods.

The Chinese laboratory, BGI, said in a statement that the outbreak found in Europe is similar to a strand that sparked an isolated case in the Central African Republic, which caused extreme diarrhea. This new strand, however, differs because its virulence is similar to two digestive diseases that cause colon inflammation and kidney failure.

Madrid threatened to sue officials in Germany who initially said they had traced the deadly strain to Spain.

"We do not rule out taking action against the authorities who called into question the quality of our products," Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba, Spain's deputy prime minister, told Spanish radio.

Spanish farmers claimed that the questionable concerns raised about their crops could cost them as much as � million ($288.7 million) per week, and 70,000 sector jobs.

"WHO does not recommend any trade restrictions related to this outbreak," the organization said in a statement released earlier Thursday. This comes as Russia has banned imports from all EU countries.

--Written by Joe Deaux in New York.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9HAmVL0PUs&feature=player_embedded (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9HAmVL0PUs&feature=player_embedded)

[Dogman]

Russia bans EU vegetables over E.coli, EU protests


http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/02/us-ecoli-russia-idUSTRE7514OG20110602

(Reuters) - Russia banned imports of fresh vegetables from the European Union Thursday, accusing Brussels of sowing chaos by failing to give sufficient information about a deadly E.coli outbreak.

The European Commission said Moscow's move was disproportionate. The outbreak has killed 17 people and made more than 1,500 others ill, and food poisoning is spreading from Germany across Europe.

Russia extended a ban on German and Spanish fresh vegetables to cover the European Union because it said Moscow had not been given proper information on the situation despite repeated requests. The source of the infection is still unclear.

"The kind of things that have been happening in the EU for a whole month do not even happen in African countries," Gennady Onishchenko, head of the Russian consumer protection agency Rospotrebnadzor, told Reuters by telephone.

"I would call the action of the EU health regulators and the other European bodies responsible for this disgrace unprofessional and irresponsible," said Onishchenko.

The European Commission urged Russia to end its ban immediately.

"The European Commission protested to the Russian Federation this afternoon against the Russian ban imposed earlier today on all EU vegetable exports to Russia, and requested the immediate withdrawal of the measure," the EU executive said in a statement.

European Commission spokesman Frederic Vincent said earlier that the EU Health Commission John Dalli would write to Moscow to express their objections.

The ban comes a week before Russia, whose leaders have often accused Europe and the United States of trying to force their rules on it, hosts EU leaders at a summit in the city of Nizhny Novgorod.

Russia is under pressure from Europe and other trade partners to announce how it will end protectionist measures, including meat import restrictions, as part of its push to join the World Trade Organization this year after an 18-year effort.

Shops in Moscow prepared to dump EU vegetables and consumers expressed a mixture of scorn and pride at the ban, while the foreign ministry quipped that Russian cucumbers were best.

"Every state will protect its market in order not to get these 'gifts', these cucumbers," Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told reporters.

"As for the quality of cucumbers, I have tried many myself, but I think that those from the Moscow region are the best -- especially the ones from my own garden," he said.

High-end Russian grocery store chain Azbuka Vkusa, which sources more than 40 percent of all its fresh vegetables and fruits from Europe, said it could replace EU produce with Turkish, Azeri and Russian goods.

Toting a shopping basket filled with grapes and fresh vegetables at a store up the street from the Bolshoi Theater, pensioner Vyacheslav Yegorov called the ban "ridiculous."

"I am not afraid of buying vegetables from any country here... This thing will blow over and be forgotten tomorrow."

But another shopper, Natalya Kuzmina, said that imported food is more likely to have been treated with chemicals and that the ban would help domestic farmers.

Russian Agriculture Minister Yelena Skrynnik played down speculation that Russia could face shortages, saying that imports of vegetables are low in the summer and that most cucumbers and tomatoes do not come from EU nations.

European Union countries exported 594 million euros ($853 million) worth of vegetables to Russia last year while EU imports of vegetables from Russia were just 29 million euros, EU data show. It was not clear what proportion of that was raw.

[Serpo]

E.coli superbug outbreak in Germany due to abuse of antibiotics in meat production
Thursday, June 02, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger




(NaturalNews) The e.coli outbreak in Germany is raising alarm worldwide as scientists are now describing this particular strain of e.coli as "extremely aggressive and toxic." Even worse, the strain is resistant to antibiotics, making it one of the world's first widespread superbug food infections that's racking up a noticeable body count while sickening thousands.

Of course, virtually every report you'll read on this in the mainstream media has the facts wrong. This isn't about cucumbers being dangerous, because e.coli does not grow on cucumbers. E.coli is an intestinal strain of bacteria that only grows inside the guts of animals (and people). Thus, the source of all this e.coli is ANIMAL, not vegetable.

But the media won't admit that. Because the whole agenda here is to kill your vegetables but protect the atrocious practices of the factory animal meat industries. The FDA, in particular, loves all these outbreaks because it gives them more moral authority to clamp down on gardens and farms. They've been trying to irradiate and fumigate fresh veggies in the USA for years. (http://www.naturalnews.com/023015_f...)

Meanwhile, scientists have been cracking the code of this particular lethal strain of e.coli. Microbiologists from the University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf now say "A preliminary analysis pointed to possible reasons for this strain of E. coli's extreme aggressiveness and resistance to antibiotics. In addition, it can now be researched how this new type of E. coli strain developed, why the strain can spread at great speed and why the illness it unleashes is so serious." (http://sg.finance.yahoo.com/news/Ki...)

Complete blackout of the obvious source of this new strain
The mainstream media is predictably pretending it has no idea where this new strain came from. They're all scratching their heads and just focusing on the "killer cucumbers" which is of course a particularly lame bit of disinfo.

Want to know where this e.coli really came from? The abuse of antibiotics in factory animal farms.

Factory animal farm operations, you see, raise cattle, pigs and chickens in such atrociously bad and dirty conditions that they have to pump them full of antibiotics just to avoid the rapid spread of infection. This constant dosing with antibiotics creates the perfect breeding ground for superbugs in the guts of these animals.

Then, these animals defecate and drop billions of e.coli bacteria with their stools which are then collected and used as crop fertilizers. So the crops are actually grown in this stuff that's contaminated with animal fecal matter containing antibiotics-induced superbugs.

The veggies grown in the e.coli fertilizer then get shipped to supermarkets, where people buy the produce and fail to wash it properly. Once they consume it, the e.coli goes to work in their own guts which are largely devoid of friendly flora because many people are also on antibiotics which wipe out their own intestinal flora, creating a perfect environment for food borne infection.

That's when people start dying, you see. It's all basic cause and effect.

So, you see, antibiotics play a double role in this tragedy: They're widely abused throughout the animal ranching industry, and they're also widely abused by doctors treating human patients. And yet the media is just strangely reluctant to print this obvious fact. They almost outright refuse to tell readers the truth: E.coli superbugs are an antibiotics problem, not a vegetable problem!

What the press says about this outbreak - wow!
Some astonishing quotes from the press:

Chinese and German scientists analyzed the DNA of the E. coli bacteria and determined that the outbreak was caused by "an entirely new, super-toxic" strain that contains several antibiotic-resistant genes, according to a statement from the Shenzhen, China-based laboratory BGI. It said the strain appeared to be a combination of two types of E. coli.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4324754...

"This is a unique strain that has never been isolated from patients before," Hilde Kruse, a food safety expert at the World Health Organization, told The Associated Press. The new strain has "various characteristics that make it more virulent and toxin-producing" than the many E. coli strains people naturally carry in their intestines. Preliminary genetic sequencing suggests the strain is a never before seen combination of two different E. coli bacteria, with aggressive genes that could explain why the outbreak appears to be so massive and dangerous, the agency said.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110602...

How to protect yourself from e.coli
On the practical side, what can you do to protect yourself from e.coli contamination of vegetables? There are FOUR simple things you can do:

1) EAT LOCAL. Grow your own food and / or buy from local farmers' markets.

2) WASH YOUR VEGGIES. If you wash them well, even e.coli won't be a problem. The e.coli is only present in those veggies that aren't adequately washed.

3) TAKE PROBIOTICS. The more "friendly" bacteria you have in your gut, the less space there is for toxic e.coli to take hold. The secret truth about these infections -- that you're not being told -- is that virtually everyone infected with toxic e.coli is someone with compromised digestive flora. Taking probiotics gives you a buffer against invading nasties.

4) AVOID ANTIBIOTICS. Most antibiotics are prescribed to humans by clueless doctors who prescribe them for things like viral infections and asthma, none of which are treated in the least by antibiotics.

These four simple steps will protect nearly everyone from e.coli infections acquired through food. So why doesn't the mainstream media teach people these four simple steps? Because they're too busy blaming cucumbers, tomatoes and spinach, I guess. They're utterly ignorant of the simple dynamics of e.coli superbug mutation and propagation.

Food safety isn't rocket science, folks. It's simpler than you've been told. And it's based on the fundamental idea that you shouldn't raise cattle, hogs and chicken in dirty, inhumane conditions requiring a constant dose of chemical antibiotics just to keep them alive.

http://www.naturalnews.com/032590_ecoli_superbugs.html

[Cebu_4_2]

This stuff is nasty!

Deadly E. coli mixes common toxin with rare "glue"

Factbox

Factbox: Facts about Europe's E. coli outbreak
7:14pm EDT

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO | Thu Jun 2, 2011 7:24pm EDT

(Reuters) - Scientists probing the deadly E. coli strain in Europe are finding the bacteria combines a highly poisonous, but common, toxin with a rarely seen "glue" that binds it to a patient's intestines.

It may take months for the global team of researchers to fully understand the characteristics of the bacteria that has killed at least 17 people in Europe and sickened 1,500. But they fear this E. coli strain is the most toxic yet to hit a human population.

Most Escherichia coli or E. coli bacteria are harmless. The strain that is sickening people in Germany and other parts of Europe, known as 0104:H4, is part of a class of bacteria known as Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli, or STEC.

This class has the ability to stick to intestinal walls where it pumps out toxins, causing diarrhea and vomiting. In severe cases, it causes hemolytic uremic syndrome or HUS, attacking the kidneys and causing coma, seizure and stroke.

"Germany is now reporting 470 cases of HUS. That is absolutely extraordinary," Dr. Robert Tauxe, a foodborne diseases expert at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told Reuters. The CDC has been working with German health authorities on the case since late last week.

"That is 10 times more than the largest outbreak in this country," he said, referring to a 1993 outbreak involving fast food hamburgers that sickened more than 700 people and killed 4. In that outbreak, there were only 44 cases of HUS.

Asked if this was the world's deadliest E. coli outbreak yet, Tauxe said: "I believe it is."

He said a strain very similar to the German strain had been seen in Korea in the 1990s, but is very rare.

Remarkably, the German strain appears to combine the toxin found in the most common type of STEC bacteria in the United States, known as E. coli O157:H7, with an unusual binding agent. Tauxe said that "glue" is typically only found in children in the developing world.

"The glue that this bug is using is not the same glue that is E. coli 0157 or most other STEC bacteria," he said. "It's this combination from the glue from another kind of E. coli and the shiga toxin that makes this an unusual strain," he said.

The World Health Organization has confirmed that the strain "has never been isolated from patients before," and said the bacteria had likely acquired some extra genes that may make it especially deadly.

SOURCE UNKNOWN

The source of the outbreak is unknown, but scientists say it is highly likely to have originated in contaminated vegetables or salad in Germany.

E.coli infections are spread by consuming even miniscule particles of feces of infected animals or humans, often via contaminated food or water.

Tauxe said the CDC has notified public health officials in all U.S. states to be on the lookout for the infections. So far, two adults from two different states have developed HUS after having traveled to Northern Germany.

U.S. health officials have not confirmed that the infections match the German strain, but Tauxe said it is very likely they are part of the same outbreak and more tests are being done to see if the infections have the same fingerprint.

He would not release the individuals' names or say where they lived.

Scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen city in southern China, who have sequenced the genome of the strain, also noted that the strain is highly resistant to several classes of antibiotics.

Tauxe said it is not clear how the bacteria became so resistant because antibiotics are not recommended as a treatment for E.coli.

He said there is no evidence that antibiotics help, and they could make things worse. "It is curious to us that it is so resistant," he said.

Dr. Phillip Tarr, a professor of microbiology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, said E. coli mutate all of the time and it may take months before scientists can fully understand the scientific characteristics of this strain.

"This is almost certainly something that cannot be sorted out in any rapid sequence," he said.

(Additional reporting by Ee Lyn Tan in Hong Kong and Kate Kelland in London; Editing by Michele Gershberg and Cynthia Osterman)

[MNeagle]

1) EAT LOCAL. Grow your own food and / or buy from local farmers' markets.



Not as easy as it sounds. We have Hmong & other 'farmers' selling all sorts of non-native fruits & veggies here. i.e. a Minnesota banana? really? Or melons, strawberries, sweet corn in June?? Many don't seem to know the language other than the money exhange part... so you can't really ask them where the food originated.

Not many grocery stores list country of origin either...

[Cebu_4_2]

Think it's possible the stuff is "in" the food and not just feces "on" the food?

[lapis]

At this point, who knows. Some people speculate that it may have been sprayed on crops, and is an Israeli-made bioweapon:

E. Coli + Germany+ Bio Weapon (http://thirteenthmonkey.blogspot.com/2011/06/e-coli-germany-bio-weapon.html)

Bioweapon or "accident," you can be sure this will be used as an excuse, not to clean up the factory farm system, but to clamp down on small farms that are doing things the right way.

The stage is also set for Big Pharma corporations to ask the government for even more money to develop a new and expensive drug to combat the problem.

[lapis]

"Most Virulent Strain of E.coli Ever Seen Contains DNA Sequences from Plague Bacteria (http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,765777,00.html)"!!

"On Tuesday, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that [researcher and director of the RKI's EHEC consulting laboratory at the Münster University Hospital in western Germany, Helge] Karch had discovered that the O104:H4 bacteria responsible for the current outbreak is a so-called chimera that contains genetic materia from various E. coli bacteria. It also contains DNA sequences from plague bacteria, which makes it particularly pathogenic. There is no risk, however, that it could cause a form of plague, Karch emphasized in remarks to the newspaper."

Manure Theory

Wherever it happened, the question of how the pathogen got onto the vegetables was still unresolved by the weekend. The suspicion that liquid manure contaminated the cucumbers seems to make sense, but only at first glance.

The E. coli bacterium is formed in the intestines of ruminants -- cows, sheep and goats -- and reaches the fields in their excrement. Vegetable farmers who have no livestock of their own can buy urine and feces from [usually factory] farm animals from suppliers of so-called liquid manure. As a rule, however, the plants are never in direct contact with the liquid manure, which is spread onto the fields before sowing.

Since the 1980s, the United States has also seen wave after wave of deadly E. coli outbreaks. While searching for the sources of the infection, scientists discovered that the bacteria enter the agricultural cycle through irrigation systems. Canadian scientists found large concentrations of the pathogen in samples taken from wells near US factory farming operations.

But this realization hardly applies to the current European case. In Spain, there is very little livestock in places where fruit and vegetables are cultivated.

Slugs Under Suspicion

Now the scientists are taking a closer look at a group of pests that were previously above suspicion: slugs. Biologists from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland identified the mollusks as potential E. coli carriers -- the bacteria can survive for up to 14 days on the slimy surface of their bodies. Arion vulgaris, the Spanish slug, has long been a problem in Germany, but it's an even bigger and more widespread problem in its native Spain.

Be it liquid manure, water or slugs, cucumbers or lettuce, organic or conventional farms -- whatever the source of the bacteria, the only solution for consumers is to wash their hands. Hand washing is also effective against smear infection, or transmission of the bacteria by way of unwashed hands after using the toilet, but this path of infection is very rare.

Fruit and vegetables are only truly germ-free when cooked. And until now, washing produce with water was seen as an effective way to eliminate the risk, because it was generally understood that E. coli is only found on the surface of produce.

That was until scientists in the department of plant pathology at the Scottish Crop Research Institute in Aberdeen made an alarming discovery: The pathogens apparently felt so comfortable on the tomatoes and lettuce they studied that they migrated from the surface to lower layers of tissue to colonize the fruit.

Great! :(

[gunDriller]

i had food poisoning twice in 2002.

i was travelling a lot on took unwise chances on fast food and my own cooking.

in one case, an egg-salad sandwich - i think.

in another case, i didn't wash a protein shake thing out right, some of it got up in the handle, got a huge collection of bacteria in that day's shake.

food poisoning can be amazingly painful. i didn't see how you can have that much pain & not die.

i actually told my Republican sister-in-law that i loved her.

[Dogman]

i had food poisoning twice in 2002.

i was travelling a lot on took unwise chances on fast food and my own cooking.

in one case, an egg-salad sandwich - i think.

in another case, i didn't wash a protein shake thing out right, some of it got up in the handle, got a huge collection of bacteria in that day's shake.

food poisoning can be amazingly painful. i didn't see how you can have that much pain & not die.

i actually told my Republican sister-in-law that i loved her.



:ROFL:

Yes! Got a case of it in Mexico and at the time , you do think you are going to die, because you feel it can not get any worse, and if it did, dieing would be better !

[keehah]

Spiegel: 'A Totally New Disease Pattern'
Doctors Shaken By Outbreak's Neurological Devastation (http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,767569,00.html)

06/09/2011 'EHEC Is Like a Chameleon'

The doctors are seeing patients who have trouble finding words, can't remember things, have extremely severe epileptic seizures or fall into a coma. "Neurologically speaking, EHEC [enterohaemorrhagic E. coli] is like a chameleon," Wertheimer explains. Practically all known complications are associated with EHEC, complications that can also trigger a stroke, traumatic brain injury or meningitis.

But why is this happening? Does the EHEC pathogen migrate all the way into the brain? No, says Wertheimer, it's more complicated than that. The E. coli strain involved, O104:H4, produces the Shiga toxin. The toxin itself isn't the only problem, however. The body's immunological response to the Shiga toxin causes the walls of all blood vessels, including those in the brain, to become inflamed and swollen. The blood vessels can be likened to pipes with an inside lining that becomes thicker and thicker, until they eventually become clogged. When that happens, parts of the brain are no longer supplied with blood and, in the worse case, can be irreversibly damaged.

At the same time, the blood vessels become abnormally porous. Toxins produced naturally in the body migrate into the organs, and water seeps into the tissue. The entire body becomes swollen with edemas. Pressure rises in the brain, which is as firmly enclosed by the skull as a nut by its shell. As a result, epileptic seizures can occur, and entire areas of the brain can malfunction, either temporarily or permanently. This can be extremely dangerous.

Wertheimer believes that it's too early to draw any conclusions about the neurological processes of all these patients. Although his family hasn't eaten any uncooked food for more than a week now, he says that this is a purely personal decision, and that he doesn't want to trigger a panic. Instead, Wertheimer would rather focus on the early treatment and rehabilitation of these deficits.

"When regions of the brain fail, they are gone for the time being, possibly forever." For this reason, it is important not to allow any valuable time to be lost, just as it is with strokes. "Acute treatment is needed, but early rehab needs to be started at the same time: occupational therapy, logotherapy and physical therapy, the full program."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shiga_toxin

Shiga toxins act to inhibit protein synthesis within target cells by a mechanism similar to that of ricin toxin produced by Ricinus communis. After entering a cell, the protein functions as an N-glycosidase, cleaving a specific adenine nucleobase from the 28S RNA of the 60S subunit of the ribosome, thereby halting protein synthesis...

The toxin requires highly specific receptors on the cells' surface in order to attach and enter the cell; species such as cattle, swine, and deer which do not carry these receptors may harbor toxigenic bacteria without any ill effect, shedding them in their feces, from where they may be spread to humans.