E. coli
kkrisberg | March 18, 2016In another example of the value of investing in public health, a recent study finds that PulseNet, a national foodborne illness outbreak network, prevents about 276,000 illnesses every year, which translates into savings of $507 million in medical costs and lost productivity. That’s a pretty big return on investment for a system that costs just $7.3 million annually to operate.
Created 20 years ago and coordinated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, PulseNet includes 83 state and federal laboratories and identifies about 1,750 disease clusters every year. It works by linking…
lborkowski | November 23, 2015Last week was World Antibiotics Awareness Week, and a new study in The Lancet Infectious Diseases showed just how dire the antibiotics situation has gotten. Authors from the South China Agricultural University, the China Agricultural University, and other institutions identified a gene that confers resistance to a last-resort antibiotic, and then found that gene in E. coli isolates from 15% of raw meat samples, 21% of pigs about to be slaughtered, and 16% of hospital patients with infections. (The study is behind a paywall, but there's a helpful summary here.)
The authors warn that given…
tsmith | September 10, 2015 A pig flying at the Minnesota state fair. Picture by TCS.
I've been involved in a few discussions of late on science-based sites around yon web on antibiotic resistance and agriculture--specifically, the campaign to get fast food giant Subway to stop using meat raised on antibiotics, and a graphic by CommonGround using Animal Health Institute data, suggesting that agricultural animals aren't an important source of resistant bacteria. Discussing these topics has shown me there's a lot of misunderstanding of issues in antibiotic resistance, even among those who consider themselves pretty…
dr. dolittle | November 28, 2014 Image from www.chow.com
Did you know that the typical Thanksgiving day broad-breasted white turkey develops in as little as 136 days (on average)? This remarkably quick development is a result of years of selective breeding. The average turkey in 1929 was only about 13 pounds, whereas modern turkeys average around 30 pounds with much of the weight centered in the breast muscles.
The Poultry Science Association claims that this breeding program has resulted in skeletal problems as muscle growth outpaces bone growth, heart problems, and a lower ability to mount immune responses to certain…
tsmith | June 18, 2012This is the sixth of 16 student posts, guest-authored by Anna Lyons-Nace.
Natural…unprocessed…raw. These terms are often used by consumers, nutritionists and health experts to denote the most healthful, high-quality food options available for consumption. However, when pertaining to the recent increasing trend in raw milk consumption, can consumers be confident that they are choosing the safest and most healthful option? Statistical data and health studies would suggest otherwise.
Before we delve into the discussion any further, we should first establish what is considered raw milk and…
milhayser | February 14, 2012
On We Beasties, Kevin Bonham reports that scientists have genetically enabled E. coli to digest a sugar found in algae. Bonham writes, "Scientists have been picking this bug's locks for decades, and it's already been engineered to make not just ethanol, but many other useful products as well." With the ability to metabolize sugar from a source as prolific, low-maintenance, and renewable as algae, E. coli could become a much bigger player in biofuel production. Meanwhile, Greg Laden considers the State of the Union address from an environmental perspective. Laden gives President Obama a…
mikethemadbiologist | August 22, 2011
There's some good news and bad news regarding E. coli surveillance in meat products. The good news:
The pathogenic Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia Coli (pSTEC) serotypes known collectively as the "Big Six" will soon be banned from U.S. meat, a top expert told a meat industry conference Thursday.
Action to declare the six non-O157:H7 serotypes as adulterants in meat could come as early as next week, according to Mohammad Koohmaraie, chief executive officer for the meat division of IEH Laboratories & Consulting Group based in Lake Forest Park, WA.
For certain, he says, the Big Six --…
mikethemadbiologist | July 27, 2011Update/clarification: I want to clarify something critical. This is not about picking on a researcher or a country. It very well could have happened in the U.S. or anywhere else. I, nor you the reader, have any idea about the internal constraints these groups experience, or what was communicated to government officials. To the extent that data sharing didn't occur due to concerns over publication, this represents an instance where the publication process--and the import attributed to it--affected the need for rapid release. That's the key point, not assigning blame to individuals or…
mikethemadbiologist | July 11, 2011I recently was in a conversation with a collaborator who isn't in the genomics biz, and said collaborator remarked that there was a lot of online criticism of the quality of the genomic data that has been generated for the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak isolates. I've been following it very closely (not surprised by that, are you?), and I'm not sure what the collaborator was referring to. On some blog, in some comment, there probably is criticism, but these are the intertoobz: that sort of thing happens.
But then it dawned on me that much of what appears to be 'criticism' is probably just a…
mikethemadbiologist | July 6, 2011In light of the recent E. coli outbreak in Germany that has killed nearly forty people, one would think the U.S. would be strengthening, not weakening microbiological surveillance in agriculture. One would be very, very wrong:
At a time of rising concern over pathogens in produce, Congress is moving to eliminate the only national program that regularly screens U.S. fruits and vegetables for the type of E. coli that recently caused a deadly outbreak in Germany.
The House last month approved a bill that would end funding for the 10-year-old Microbiological Data Program, which tests about 15,…
mikethemadbiologist | June 27, 2011Consider this a post wherein I engage in some speculation, and hope that I'm very, very wrong. You see, the 'German' E. coli O104:H4 outbreak ('HUSEC041') has taken a confusing turn:
The strain of E. coli blamed for 46 deaths in Germany appears to have resurfaced in France, the French Ministry of Health said.
The new outbreak has sickened eight people, who went to two hospitals in Bordeaux, authorities said.
Officials interviewed seven of them, all of whom reported having attended an open house at a children's recreation center. Six of them reported having eaten sprouts during the visit, "…
tsmith | June 24, 2011Part One
It appears that the E. coli O104 sproutbreak is starting to wind down, with more than 3,500 cases diagnosed to date and 39 deaths. Though sprouts remain the key source of the bacterium, a recent report also documents that human carriers helped to spread the organism (via H5N1 blog). In this case, it was a food service employee working at a catering company, who spread infection to at least 20 people before she even realized she was infected.
As with many infectious diseases, there are potential lingering sequelae of infection, which can occur weeks to years after the acute…
tsmith | June 22, 2011I left off yesterday with the initial discovery of "Vero toxin," a toxin produced by E. coli (also called "Shiga toxin" or "Shiga-like toxin"). Though this may initially seem unconnected to hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS), the discovery of this cytotoxin paved the way for a clearer understanding of the etiology of this syndrome, as well as the mechanisms by which disease progressed. By the early 1980s, several lines of research pointed toward E. coli, and particularly O157:H7, as the main cause of HUS.
A 1982 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention MMWR report found a rare E. coli…
tsmith | June 21, 2011As I mentioned yesterday, the epidemiology of hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) was murky for several decades after it was first defined in the literature in 1955. In the ensuing decades, HUS was associated with a number of infectious agents, leading to the general belief that it was a "multifactorial disease"--one that had components of genetics and environment, much like we think of multiple sclerosis today, for example.
Several HUS outbreaks made people think twice about that assumption, and look deeper into a potential infectious cause. A 1966 paper documented the first identified outbreak…
tsmith | June 20, 2011It appears that the E. coli O104 sproutbreak is starting to wind down, with more than 3,500 cases diagnosed to date and 39 deaths. Though sprouts remain the key source of the bacterium, a recent report also documents that human carriers helped to spread the organism (via H5N1 blog). In this case, it was a food service employee working at a catering company, who spread infection to at least 20 people before she even realized she was infected.
As with many infectious diseases, there are potential lingering sequelae of infection, which can occur weeks to years after the acute infection has…
mikethemadbiologist | June 14, 2011Regarding the German outbreak strain of E. coli, the data are fairly clear: it is an enteroaggregative E. coli ('EAEC') which has acquired antibiotic resistance genes and a Shiga-like toxin from an Shiga-toxinogenic E. coli ('STEC'). EAEC are interesting--according to the European Food Safety Authority:
EAEC have been implicated as a cause of persistent diarrhea in children and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome-associated diarrhea, as well as acute diarrhea in travelers. Not all EAEC strains have been shown to cause diarrhea in humans. The EAEC are a heterogeneous group of bacteria that…
mikethemadbiologist | June 13, 2011Note that I said cranky, not mad. Mad is reserved for moral degenerates who cut funding to assist people with cerebral palsy. But cranky? Yes. Recently, I've come across a couple of papers that describe interesting collections of E. coli. For example, one paper isolated a bunch of E. coli from soil and water in Hawaii to determine if there is a dominant point source of fecal contamination and if there are sustainable populations of E. coli in Hawaiian soils (which would mean we can't use simple counts of E. coli to determine if a water source is contaminated by feces). Another paper…
lborkowski | June 10, 2011After blaming cucumbers, backpedaling on the cucumbers and blaming bean sprouts, then backpedaling on the sprouts, German authorities have now concluded that bean sprouts are, in fact, to blame for the spread of E. coli O104:H4, which has sickened more than 3,000 people and killed 31. Patients with the most severe cases have suffered kidney and neurological damage.
This morning, authorities announced in Berlin that epidemiologic evidence, rather than laboratory results, pointed to bean sprouts from an organic farm in Lower Saxony as the source of the outbreak. The New York Times' Alan Cowell…
mikethemadbiologist | June 10, 2011Here are some O104:H4 links. The E.coli O104:H4 Genome Analysis Crowdsourcing wiki is also a good source of the latest scientific information. Anyway, links:
TGAC helps in crowd-sourcing analysis of E. coli strain
Possible T6SS in EAEC 55989 is absent from TY2482 genome?
STEC/EHEC outbreak - horizontally transferred genes
Phage analysis of German E. coli outbreak genome
E. coli: What we know and need to
E. Coli: Don't Blame the Sprouts!
Typing of German E. coli
More Stomach-Churning Facts about the E. Coli Outbreak
Are Bean Sprouts the End of Organic Farming? Nah.
New German STEC/EHEC data…
tsmith | June 10, 2011Via H5N1, German officials are calling it for sprouts:
Germany on Friday blamed sprouts for a bacteria outbreak that has left at least 30 dead and some 3,000 ill, and cost farmers across Europe hundreds of millions in lost sales.
"It's the sprouts," Reinhard Burger, the president of the Robert Koch Institute, Germany's national disease centre, told a news conference on the outbreak of enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC) in northern Germany.
"People who ate sprouts were found to be nine times more likely to have bloody diarrhoea or other signs of EHEC infection than those who did not," he said,…