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University Hospital Münster/Institute for HygieneThe E. coli O104:H4 strain has a pattern that looks like a stack of bricks on cultured intestinal epithelial cells. The E. coli bacteria that killed dozens of people in Germany over the past month have a highly unusual combination of two traits and that may be what made the outbreak among the deadliest in recent history, scientists there are reporting. One trait was a toxin, called Shiga, that causes severe illness, including bloody diarrhea and, in some patients, kidney failure. The other is the ability of this strain to gather on the surface of an...

Women, beansprouts, cucumbers, bacteria, cows: the cast of the current European Escherichia coli outbreak is already a crowd. Enter the phage. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria, and they are star players in the chain of events that led to this outbreak. 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. It's hard to be sure of the culprit — but this simply serves to highlight the importance of understanding how infectious bacteria get into the food chain in the first place. Case-control...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Health officials said Thursday three people in the United States are suspected to have fallen ill from e-coli bacteria after traveling to Germany where the mystery outbreak has killed 17. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was awaiting blood samples before any confirmation could be made, spokesman Tom Skinner told AFP. The suspected cases were not fatal. Earlier, Britain said seven people there had been infected with the bacteria, including three British nationals who had recently traveled to Germany and four German nationals. A total of 18 people in Europe have died from the outbreak, all...

Just from the high number of deaths and severe cases, scientists and public health experts battling Germany's massive E. coli outbreak knew they were up against something unusual. Now, early results from sequencing projects of the enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) strain appear to confirm that a never-before-seen hybrid, combining the worst of several bacterial strains, is causing the havoc. The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), in Shenzhen, China—which today announced that it has sequenced the microbe's entire 5.2-million-base-pair genome—says that its acquisition of several virulence genes make this EHEC strain "supertoxic." The outbreak, which has caused mayhem in European trade relations,...