Speedy tweets matter for science, and fimbriae hairs matter for death and disease from lethal German EHEC E. coli germs

…[The German outbreak bacteria form ﬁmbriae [pili].” Fimbriae are small tentacles that help EAEC bacteria stick to the intestinal wall. This could lead to a stronger colonization of the gut and more toxin being released into the body.

Speed matters: Scientists Rush to Study Genome of Lethal E. coli

…an armada of scientists around the world who are analyzing available genomic data on the ﬂy and, via tweets, wikis, and blogs, disseminating results online. “I am really surprised and impressed at how fast this is developing,” says Holger Rohde, a microbiologist at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf. “I think it shows how relevant this platform can be to science.
The picture emerging from these ﬁrst analyses is surprising:

Continue reading “Speedy tweets matter for science, and fimbriae hairs matter for death and disease from lethal German EHEC E. coli germs” →

Scrutiny of all the evidence and the whole food chain is narrowing down the culprit in the German E. coli outbreak to sprouts operations in the Hamburg region

Updated 9/06/2011

The mists of uncertainty are starting to clear in Germany, after much waxing and waning over the last few days.

To find the culprit good detective work on what people eat and where they eat has been essential. Sprouts have been added to the lists of suspect foods which included cucumbers and tomatoes. Faecal contamination of sprouts is a common cause of major food outbreaks, as they are not cooked and provide conditions for ready multiplication of bacteria when bean shoots are sprouted.
Furthermore, perceptive comments reported in the New York Times point out that the pattern of disease fits with a contamination source somewhere in the food chain local to the Hamburg region in Germany, and not from outside the country. This could be contamination of beans in the field, [manure on the farm,] contamination from washing water, contamination from infected workers in a processing plant, or from a broken pipe in a water or sewer system. We don’t yet know exactly.
Recent news specifically mentions a particular sprout farm that has now closed. See links at end of this post. Amazingly, the manager of the farm “can’t understand how the processes we have here and the accusations could possibly fit together”. Later news provided by Spiegel online provides strong confirmation that the farm is the culprit:
Continue reading “Scrutiny of all the evidence and the whole food chain is narrowing down the culprit in the German E. coli outbreak to sprouts operations in the Hamburg region” →

The lethal elephant in the room: Real risks in our food

Even as speculation about imaginary risks of GM foods continues, particularly among some organic sector enthusiasts, real food risks in the food chain remain unmanaged.
Exposure of fresh vegetable produce to manure is a case in point. Pathogenic Escherichia coli are one of more frequent health dangers of fresh vegetables. These bacteria can be present in manure, and they spread in faeces and water. Tragically, banning of GM crops in Germany has not eliminated these risks. Continue reading “The lethal elephant in the room: Real risks in our food” →

Miracul in your tomatoes

Know your tomatoes May 13, 2011 Re-posted from Phys.org

Genetically modified (GM) tomatoes look much the same as traditional varieties (Fig. 1). But are they?
By comparing the chemical diversity of strains of GM tomatoes with a control strain and traditional reference cultivars, a research team in Japan has developed a way to distinguish between them.

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