And dont but veggies that came across the border with 2 dozen immigrants buried in them with no toilet.

Does a short window of time suggest or sound as if it was deliberately introduced?

And write down what you eat and where you bought it in case you get sick. The German government is telling us (I'm overseas) that we should avoid cucumbers, but in the same sentence that cucumbers are probably not the source of E. coli. They tell us that there is a deadly bacteria of unknown origin, but that shouldn't stop us from going out for lunch every day. "Be scared, but try not to protect yourself," is the gist I'm getting.

They should be telling us all to keep a written record of our food intake, swimming activities, tap water consumption, etc., for a few weeks to get to the bottom of this outbreak. They should also be telling people and restaurants to wash, peel, or boil everything applicable, and walk away from anything that can't be treated hygienically.

Sounds like they are looking to pin this on a much larger business with much wider implications and much more money to extract and much more government control to impose.

Once again, STexan making a conspiracy theory, and then upvoting his own comments.

I wonder if Germany still uses human sewage as fertilizer on their fields as in the 1960's. Honeywagons were seen daily on the streets of a small town where I was stationed. American military were cautioned not to eat any vegetables that grew underground in Germany.

@STexan,

Your logic is faulty. This restaurant is common to only 17 of over 1800 known victims. That's less than 1%. That's even rotten for a phoney-baloney conspiracy theory.

Europeans tend to eat fresh, seasonal, local vegetables usually bought fresh daily or every couple of days. Salads are extremely popular in the spring as a result. Most western Europeans are just as hygienic, if not more so, than most Americans. Europeans are very much more aware of the source of their vegetables than Americans by a long shot.

And, just to keep the record straight. E. Coli is pervasive in the environment. If is on your skin. It is in your drinking water, no matter how purified it claims to be. It is in the air. It is in the soil. It is on the surface of every living thing. You cannot wash it away nor is there anything that will completely kill it that will not kill you as well. What you can do is to use clean water to obey that 3000 year old axiom ---- the solution to pollution is dilution. You wash things to lower the concentration of e. coli. Irradiation is a possible partial solution, but it is unlikely that the so-called "organic" movement will ever allow it, since they would lose considerable money. (The two largest "organic" producers are ADM and ConAgra who wrote all the definitions so that virtually anything farmed to day, using any pesticide, insecticide, fungicide, or herbicide is "organic.")

The problem is that bacteria freely exchange bits of genetic material in a constant form of what is called "adaptive pervasiveness." This is a knack that bacteria have that viruses do not have. Bacteria can accumulate "desirable" characteristics while viruses generally permanently lose a desirable trait for every one they pick up.

E. coli is pretty much one of the best at doing adaptive pervasiveness, creating new strains virtually daily. But new strains are almost always not as well adapted as the old ones and are out-competed by existing e. coli strains. But once in a while new tricks develop.

Usually existing bacteria (including e. coli) and the body's own defenses are enough to keep e. coli in check. But the bacteria is always seeking new ways to elude these defenses and out-compete other bacteria and environmental opponents. In this case the e. coli has managed to find a way to super-glue itself to the intestinal wall resisting "flushing" by diarrhea, produce much more of known e. coli toxins, and is producing kidney, gastro-intestinal, and neurological effects that have never been observed before.

This is the price we pay for internationalization and commoditization. We have made trade global, including agriculture and have thus provided a much richer evolutionary field for bacteria and viruses to play on. This will continue and will worsen with time. We can only take common sense precautions, ignore straw dog and conspiracy arguments and focus on rapid response to new infectious agents.

Nota bene: Europe is much better prepared to combat this sort of thing than the US because of universal health care which allow their federal authorities access to medical records for virtually everyone very quickly. Here, we have to try to guess from those treated how the infection is progressing since we have only very spotty public health reporting.

Chris

Wonderful to see some intelligent posting on this vine. Thank you for the excellent summation.

If Benedict Cumberbatch is still playing Sherlock, PLEASE send him over to the US! He can stay with me!

Sherlock is in the bathroom, groaning.

Um... organic vegetables are far more likely to have been grown using manure as a fertilizer. I would be washing those especially well.

I use a product to enrich my soil that is treated and composted human waste from our local sewage treatment plant. Makes wonderful vegetables, and it is clean and sterile, until the dirt from my garden gets in it, anyway.

yeah... umm. I think I will stick with Miracle Grow...

goldpointe, shouldn't that "goes through too many intestines".

Aliens eat rats raw. I know, I saw them do it the movies.

Bill would that be the MIB type aliens or do you need a geography lesson due to the text book revisions in TX?

hey DASVET

......remember what they tell us at the therapy sessions...you never.....NEVER....let anyone know that you actually watched BATTLEFIELD EARTH.......

damn, caught again!

Didn't you make that same post about Mexicans? Cut and paste posting?

It is rather interesting that now a European country has suffered the same fate

as the US from eating veggies produced under unsanitary conditions, ours came from Mexico, theirs from Germany.

'busterboy'?

Forgetting the multiple cases of e. coli in vegetables from California?

The multiple cases of e. coli across the entire US in hamburger (Jack-in-the-Box come to mind?)?

Maybe you should do some research prior to your pontificating about 'illegals'?

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol5no5/mead.htm

AgentFossil,

I always thought it was strange how a bacterium we already have in our intestines can cause illness when ingested. After all, it's just going back to where it came from in the first place and yet causes so much damage along the way!

AgentFossil,

That is not entirely true. There are many different types/strains of E. coli. There are generic E. coli that do not necessarily cause illness. However, there are pathogenic E. coli that do. This is one of those. It is called Enterohaemorhagic E. coli (sometimes called EHEC). This one, in particular is O104:H4, where the letter O stands for somatic antigen and the H stands for the flagella antigen. The more common one that we know of in the US is O157:H7. That is the one that hit Jack-In-The-Box.

So long story short, all E. coli is not bad. At least as it relates to directly making you sick. However, generic E. coli is an indication of contamination. Normally fecal contamination.

Crowny,

You seem to be pretty knowledgeable about biology. The only thing I remember from biology class about E.Coli is that we have E.Coli in our intestines naturally, and that the bacterium helps us with the digestion of our food. We couldn't live without it. Thanks for the additional information.

E. Coli is a very common bacteria found in the intestines of nearly every warm-blooded animal. This is ONE particular strain. I can guarantee the vast majority of people reading this right now have harmless strains of E. Coli in your intestines right now.

A normal culture of bacteria is actually REQUIRED for your body to digest a good number of the foods that you eat.

This is an awful way to find out what is "bad' bacteria.

freedom1st,

No doubt!

That is not entirely true. There are many different types/strains of E. coli. There are generic E. coli that do not necessarily cause illness. However, there are pathogenic E. coli that do. This is one of those. It is called Enterohaemorhagic E. coli (sometimes called EHEC).

There is also E. coli that is grown in a lab and used for experiments,it was weaponized years ago. There is no antibiotic know at this time that can kill it.

Could be some new mutant strain from japans radiation outbreak.

i don't know if anybody important will read this

No worries, mate.

Not only in Germany, but in the USA, England, France and most of the EU countries, almost all of Asia. It is a very common practice.

Many municipalities in the USA produce a product of treated, composted and sterilized solid waste. It makes a great fertilizer. The articles and websites that attack it claim that it contains fluoride, and for that reason they call it toxic or that it contains heavy metals. Like almost all soil additives, it does contain metals, but the concentration is much lower than most commercial fertilizers. They also invariably post studies about slurry from non-composted sewage and claim it is the same thing. It is not.

The EPA has certified most, if not all, such products as safe for unlimited application.