What do you mean by natural? e-coli comes from human or animal waste.

eat sh&t and die!! lol, sorry

E-coli is found in all soil and in the gut of warm blooded organisms. Most strains are harmless to people. Some strains give people upset stomachs and a few strains are deadly. The non toxic ones are considered a natural component of the normal flora found in the gut.

The article states: "the pattern of the outbreak had produced enough evidence to draw that conclusion even though no tests of sprouts,... had come back positive for the E. coli strain behind the outbreak." (Emphasis added.)

This is utter nonsense! They call that epidemiology!? They call that science!?

They have no evidence of E. coli on the food but they now know the food was to blame! Someone has an agenda here and that is damn certain. First it was supposedly organic Spanish cucumbers or maybe lettuce or maybe tomatoes and now for sure it's organic bean sprouts even though there is no E. coli on the sprouts?

The only commonality I see here is the word "organic". Is this someone's plan to put people off organically raised food? It certainly doesn't make a scrap of sense and no-one but a fool would give credit to this nonsense.

There is nothing natural about this E coli. It did not just spring up, it was genetically engineered. This strain has never shown any drug resistance and now all of a sudden it is resistant to eight classes of antibiotics and has somehow gained at least two distinct virulence genes never before noted in any E coli. It is time people stop pretending and look for the lab where it was developed.

Moral: Grow your own food.

Investigation tracked bacteria to farm even though tests were negative for deadly strain

This is more of that European logic... the absense of any evidence leads us to the conclusion that he's the guilty party!... I'm calling shenanigans though.

Sort of sounds like the BS "Consensus" on man made global warming. No proof but it is agreed it exists. Just because idiot's believe something does not make it real.

If you believe their unfounded logic you will believe anything they tell you. It does not make them right.

Perhaps someone like Monsanto has an agenda like GMO foods and have a monopoly on this???? Remember when SARS broke out in Canada??? They were about ready to legalize marijuana, allow seniors citizens from the US to be to buy meds at a lower cost and one other thing that the US didnt like. So all of a sudden SARS broke out, something else happened and they closed the boarders. When Canada dropped those bills, all of a sudden SARS went away. Wake up people. This Ecoli IS bio engineered along with aids and other viruses. They are trying to shut down natural whole food production, along with natural herbal and vitamin sales to the public because of big pharma.

What about the whole swine flu BS from a couple of years ago? Mexico was threatening the US with tariffs on all imports because congress was going to stop allowing Mexican trucks unlimited access to our roads.

Right after Mexico threatened the US is when the swine flu suddenly hit in Mexico City and then supposedly spread throughout the world. The strain was created in a lab too. All it takes is to have your eyes wide open to see what is nature and man made. Most of these outbreaks have been man made.

This is why I never eat anything green, yellow, orange or red. Anything that is one of those colors is dangerous..... ;)

Even jelly beans?

Even jelly beans?

Ouch - Good point....

You obviously don't know where e-coli comes from. E-coli made the people sick, not the food.

Suppose the zucchinni grower had been the problem. What part of the human anatomy would you equate the zucchinni to?

Suppose the zucchinni grower had been the problem. What part of the human anatomy would you equate the zucchinni to?

Now that's funny....

Maybe ecoli comes from your face jesse cause it seems like it's filled with escrimate. And how dare you even suggest that zuchinni could even hypothetically be the culpirt, it is a fine and noble vegetable. It would be the ankle, which is a underrated yet vital body part!

Which illegal criminal aliens group does Germany have again? Please teach me wise one.

You don't have to be illegal to have improper sanitary habits. Men only wash their hands 40% of the time, studies show.

There is a guy that sits in the office next to me that goes to the bathroom, we hear the toilet lid slam, hear flush, and he walks out. Never washes hands. Hey, I guess he is an illegal criminal alien!!!

Jessie, e-coli on produce does not come from the workers failing to wash their hands. You must be city-folk....

Honey buckets!

Exactly how does an e coli outbreak in Germany relate to illegal aliens in the US?

Exactly how does an e coli outbreak in Germany relate to illegal aliens in the US?

It's the new TeleCrap app for the Droid phones.

I think you are supposed to conclude that the sprouts is what brought the e.coli to the humans.

The Germans started it, they blamed Spanish Cucumbers, vegetables)

Merkel wants to keep her nose out about other countries work ethics and get paying massive compensation to the workers whose livelyhoods her country has destroyed.

The arrogance of this country never ceases to amaze me.

yeah, those Mexicans are crossing the border into Germany by the truck load.

Dear lord, what happened to the education level in America? Can we do an IQ test on NV as a requirement before posting?

she makes stool?

Let me guess,

1) Sign up for NV account with "funny" name

2) Troll people posting in comments

3) ????

4) Profit

So you know that "for a fact", eh? Seems your Weiner truly does get around!! ROFLMAO!!!!!!!

Beware of the word "organic." Organic does not necessarily mean "healthy."

Pig turds are organic.

When you gotta go, you gotta go.

I have to agree with you. The fact that this is a never seen before strain, the timing (a major festival in northern Germany), and the fact that the "hard" evidence has somehow disappeared -- is very suspicious. If this truly was/is a naturally evolved strain then somewhere in this mess there should be evidence of similarly evolved bacteriophage viruses for this same Ecoli strain. My understanding is that bacteriophage viruses normally evolve at about the same rate as the bacterial strain being targeted ?? If the farm has been using the same sources - water, seed, growing media, workers, etc. -- this should have happened once or twice before on a smaller scale, before turning in to a major outbreak. I am only a farm boy - but to me this
incident has more of an appearence of a lab engineered (gene spliced) bacteria which was purposefully developed and distributed into a likely food source.

What they do not tell you about the bacteriophage mandated usage on our food supply is that when we eat the foods that harness the bacteriophage and it attacks the natural e-coli and other bacteria in our system, what happens to the viruses or bacteria after they get eaten/attacked by the phages?

The waste or dead viruses and bacteria have to go somewhere. It ends up in your system and other viruses and bacteria present in your system naturally feed on the waste produced or if the phages fail to do their intended agenda. That is why people can still get ill from foods designed to "protect" us from nature. The measures taken to help you are involved in making the situation worse by creating stains never seen before in nature.

Nice conspiracy theory, but bacteia does evolve naturally, not just in labs.

The reason E. coli outbreaks happen in the US more than Europe is that Americans raise far more animals in "factory farm" conditions than Europeans. The virulent, antibiotic resistant strains that cause these mini-epidemics arise form the overuse of antibiotics in animal husbandry. The animals are fed antibiotics on a daily basis so that they do not become ill from being kept in unsanitary and often downright cruel conditions.

Go to Google Video and watch "Food Inc".

Also read this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/05/deadly-ecoli-resistance-antibiotic-misuse

Why does it seem like Europe might have an outbreak like this once every like 5 or so years but in the US it at least once a year?

LULAC and La Raza

I wish I had a buck for every Newsvine poster who proclaims they don't care about something while proving that they at least care enough to post a comment on the article.

What's up dude? Nothing good on TV?

I know I click on article after article just to write that I don't care about it. Its so cool. LOL

I know that this is off topic but I must ask" Why do people respond to surveys and have no opinion?" This has baffled me for years.

And now the Pretend FBI™ in conjunction with Bucky the Little Mutant Raccoon™ and Angela Gossow's Underpants informs those readers seeking enlightenment for the betterment of others of today's Baldenario Advisory for Novices™ . . .

Currently, there are seven hypotheses for the cause of the German E. coli breakout, listed in no particular order or probability . . .

(1) This type of E. coli originates from animals, where some of the more commonly troublesome types of E. coli originate from cattle that are kept in high-intensity feedlots, so one possibility is that contaminated beef was transported in a truck or railcar, at which time liquids and other material from the contaminated beef leaked into the truck or railcar, and then the truck or railcar was used to haul vegetables (cucumbers, lettuce, and tomatoes) without first being cleaned and sanitized, so contaminated liquids and residue from the beef got onto the vegetables . . .

(2) In a similar but somewhat different scenario, at a food distribution warehouse one of the forklift drivers mistakenly moved a leaking container of contaminated beef over the tops of containers of vegetables, and this is where the contamination occurred . . .

(3) In a combination of (1) and (2), smaller refrigerated delivery trucks carried both contaminated beef and vegetables to local stores, and this is where the infected material from leaking beef containers got onto uncovered or inadequately protected vegetable containers . . .

(4) In yet another variation, workers at the distribution warehouse, local grocery store, or market worked with leaky contaminated beef containers and then switched to working with vegetables but without pausing between activities to wash their hands and to change work gloves . . .

(5) In a scenario similar to the 1984 bioterror attack by followers of Osho (a.k.a., Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), bioterrorists working in the trucking, railroad, or food warehousing and distributing sectors intentionally applied a new and highly virulent E. coli strain to vegetables, which could have been done by spraying the vegetables, pouring liquid onto the vegetables, and so forth, where for the bioterrorists the least dangerous method would be to pour a liquid or perhaps to spread a paste, since aerosol application would require the bioterrorists to need to wear masks and goggles. If there is a vegetable rinsing step in the distribution chain, then the contaminating agent could have been applied there, where instead of adding a vegetable sanitizing or cleaning agent to the rinsing water the contaminating E. coli bacteria was added . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_attack

COMMENTS

Since news reports appear to suggest that the infections in Germany are localized to the northern part of Germany, it should not be so difficult to narrow the possibilities for transportation and distribution, as well as to identify the various truck, rail, distributing, and processing companies and their employees . . .

And since the reported incidences in other European countries appear to be similarly focused on particular areas or regions, this tends to make it easier to narrow the possibilities to specific trucking, rail, distributing, and processing companies, routes, and workers . . .

Explained another way, there are audit trails and clues, and there are ways to examine audit trails and clues toward the goal of identifying and recognizing patterns . . .

In the 1980s, there was a fascinating article in an information technology trade magazine which explained one of the techniques that Interpol used to determine the hierarchy and structure of a criminal organization, where the technique involved examining telephone records of suspected criminal organization members . . .

The names of the suspected criminal organization members were placed on the outer edge of a large circle, and then lines where drawn to connect respective names whenever there was a telephone call between two suspected criminal organization members . . .

As more telephone calls were added to the system and connected, a pattern emerged, and it became very easy to identify the bosses, mid-level gang leaders, and low-level criminals, since the clusters of lines clearly revealed that low-level criminals called mid-level gang leaders, but only the mid-level gang leaders called the bosses . . .

It takes a while to collect all the data, but once the data is collected and input to a computer system, there are quite a few techniques that can be used to analyze the data toward the goal of identifying patterns to reveal hidden information, which is one of the ways public health, agricultural, and security analysts connect the dots . . .

DNA "fingerprinting" is considerably more advanced at the dawn of the early-21st century, and while it takes a bit of time, there are ways that scientists can determine with reasonable accuracy where the various bits and snippets of DNA and other material originated, which is one of the ways this particular E. coli strain has been identified as a rare "superbug" . . .

This bit of information is intriguing:

The DNA of the new E. coli strain, believed to have contaminated salad vegetables, was analyzed by Chinese and German scientists. It contains several genes that cause antibiotic resistance and is similar to a strain that causes serious diarrhea and is found in the Central African Republic, according to a statement from the Shenzhen, China-based laboratory, BGI. Those scientists were working together with the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf.

And this bit of information is well-known:

"One should think of an animal source," Kruse said. "Many animals are hosts of various types of toxin-producing E. coli." Some scientists suspect the deadly E. coli might have originated in contaminated manure used to fertilize vegetables.

[SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43248315/ns/health-food_safety/ ]

No doubt, top scientists, researchers, and security analysts are working frantically in their laboratories and computing facilities to determine and to identify everything as quickly as possible, so with the CDC in the US and the WHO worldwide involved in the search, as well as all the European agencies and organizations being involved, of course, it is likely that more dots will be connected . . .

And in the creative writing department, this is yet another possibility:

(6) Somewhere in northern Germany there is a top-secret laboratory that for decades has been doing patently strange and bizarre experiments in genetic engineering, all of which were done using generally-accepted standards and practices with respect to the proper handling of highly-toxic genetic waste materials, but after decades of outstanding work the director of the laboratory's toxic waste disposal protocols and systems, Gunter von Noodle-Wanker, retired earlier this year and in a cost-saving effort the decision was made to eliminate the position rather than to hire a suitably well-trained replacement, and one of the unexpected consequences of the departure of von Noodle-Wanker was that the task of disposing truly strange and bizarre genetic toxic wastes fell into the purvey of Jacques de Twitt, a fellow from France who unfortunately slept through most of his German language classes when he was in trade school in Bordeaux, which in an odd series of missteps led de Twitt to think that "nicht freigegeben" meant to "release at night" rather than "not to be released", which then led de Twitt to pull the lever labeled "sehr schlechte Zeug" sometime after midnight several weeks ago, which sent a stream of very bad stuff into the small creek that occasionally overflows into the parking lot of the nearby Fantastisch Leckere Gurken, Salat, Tomate Unternehmen® distribution center . . .

[NOTE: Based on recent information revealed by the CDC and the discovery of a verified E. coli contaminated cucumber in Eastern Germany, which not so long ago was part of the former Soviet Union, Baldenario has added a seventh hypothesis to the list, which for for the enlightenment and betterment of slower novices suggests that this might be the first recorded instance of sexually transmitted food poisoning (STFP), at least in a country where French is not the primary language, which as noted in one of the previous Baldenario's Advisory for Novices updates does not preclude the zoonotic possibility of this disturbing food poisoning event earning Germany the 2011 Baha Men Award for "Who Let The Dogs Out" . . . ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uaPs8sxqB0

(7) Since it is well known that there is a significant human trafficking trade in Europe and that indentured servants and human slaves tend to come from Asia, Russia, and the various satellites of the former Soviet Union, it is possible that indentured servants and sex industry workers from these areas were exposed to the aforementioned outbreaks of gnarly E. coli and recovered but continue to be carriers, perhaps in a way similar to "Typhoid Mary", who eventually was kept in quarantine after being declared a public health risk at the turn of the 20th century, really . . .

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_Mary

Really! :-o