E. Coli super strain

I was told about the sequencing results from E. Coli in the German outbreak just a few hours ago before I left BGI. This new strain has some very strange and lethal features. I wasn't going to blog about it -- the scientist involved said the results were confidential -- but it's already in the Times. At one point the words "man made" were used, but of course a rare natural event might produce a bacterium that seems to be optimized for killing people.

NYTimes: ... In a statement on Thursday, a Chinese laboratory collaborating with German scientists said the contagion had been caused by a “new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic.” The strain carries “several antibiotic resistant genes,” according to the Beijing Genomics Institute in the southern city of Shenzen, “which makes antibiotic treatment extremely difficult.”

The statement referred to the strain as “entirely new” and “super-toxic” and said it was similar to a strain known as EAEC 55989 found in the Central African Republic and known to cause serious diarrhea. The Chinese laboratory had been working with scientists at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf at the epicenter of the outbreak.

“The situation is still tense,” said Jörg Debatin, director of the Hamburg-Eppendorf facility. “At the beginning of the week we had been hoping to see a trend towards fewer infections, but that has not happened.”

Holger Rohde, a bacteriologist at the same medical center, said tests conducted with the Chinese scientists in Shenzen had shown that the new strain was a hybrid that caused the virulent complication of E.coli known as hemolytic uremic syndrome, or HUS, which attacks the kidneys and can be lethal.

“This is a genetic combination we have not seen before,” he said. About 80 per cent of the genetic composition derived from the E.Coli strain 0104. But the other 20 per cent came from another more toxic bacterium.

Louise Brown, a spokeswoman for Britain’s Health Protection Agency, said the strain of E.coli causing the outbreak “has a combination of characteristics that have not been identified in strains that have caused illness before.”