[neverdem]

micro ping

[Steely Tom]

Bacterial infections often originate from contaminated food, but it is now about six weeks since the start of this outbreak and the trail is going cold.

Oh don't worry. I'm sure will heat up again real soon.

[ari-freedom]

Westerners tend to eat cucumbers and bean sprouts raw.

[Billthedrill]

The term for this is "transduction" if anyone cares. Fascinating stuff. E. coli also conjugate.

[garjog]

One theory is that this is a terror attack:

“Bioengineering a deadly superbug

So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that’s resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?

There’s really only one way this happens (and only one way) — you have to expose this strain of e.coli to all eight classes of antibiotics drugs. Usually this isn’t done at the same time, of course: You first expose it to penicillin and find the surviving colonies which are resistant to penicillin. You then take those surviving colonies and expose them to tetracycline. The surviving colonies are now resistant to both penicillin and tetracycline. You then expose them to a sulfa drug and collect the surviving colonies from that, and so on. It is a process of genetic selection done in a laboratory with a desired outcome. This is essentially how some bioweapons are engineered by the U.S. Army in its laboratory facility in Ft. Detrick, Maryland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation...).";

http://www.naturalnews.com/032622_ecoli_bioengineering.html

[hope]

Comes down to govenment healthcare, taking the easy road and prescribing the over use of anti-biotics for the quick fix.

Who ever subsribes to this prescription is dead.

[sagar]

Let the freemarket sort out this out. If you don’t like bacteria infection, then don’t buy and eat raw food!

[caphillbabe]

Nature news? Really?

[TEXOKIE]

Pinging decimon!...

[editor-surveyor]

Probably deadly only to those that make a habit of using antibiotics.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Maybe a different strain of phage could be developed that gets to the E. coli first, before these toxin producing phages can.

[vetvetdoug]

Reminds me of the Corynebacterium spp. T-phage. The toxin stimulating phage plus the antibiotic resistance makes the E. coli highly pathogenic. There is a highly pathogenic E.coli in newborn calves that can be successfully prevented by vaccination of the cows. I hope it doesn't come to vaccination but if this form of E. coli becomes more prevalent it may be necessary to do so.