E.Coli Worries in Germany

(Photo: Eric Erbe, USDA ; digital colorization: Christopher Pooley, USDA)

Anchor Lisa Mullins talks to science reporter Jörg Blech, who writes for the German weekly “Der Spiegel,” about the outbreak of E.Coli infections in Germany.

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LISA MULLINS: I’m Lisa Mullins and this is The World.  You might recall the outbreak of e.coli in Western United States in 1993.  The bacteria killed four children, and it sickened about 500 people after they ate contaminated hamburgers at Jack in the Box.  That was just about the most notorious outbreak of e.coli.  A more recent one sickened 70 people in 30 states just a couple of years ago.  Europeans are currently in the grip of e.coli fear.  The bacteria have killed 16 people, all but one in Germany.  German officials originally reported that contaminated cucumbers from Spain caused the outbreak, but molecular biologist Jörg Blech, who writes for the weekly ‘Der Spiegel’ in Germany, says the scientists now acknowledge that the problem was not with the Spanish cucumbers.

JÖRG BLECH: They recheck now, and they said it’s a different strain than the strain we can isolate from the patients, so they’ve been on the wrong track actually.

MULLINS: Okay, I just want to make sure that I’m clear on this, Jörg.  The cucumbers from Spain, I realize that the e.coli is not the same as it is in those people who were infected, but are we saying there’s some strain of e.coli on the Spanish cucumbers?

BLECH: Exactly.  There was some strain of e.coli, and you could argue this is not good in the first place, however this strain of e.coli is different from the strain of e.coli that causes now this huge problem in so many patients.

MULLINS: Okay, so that is worrisome to begin with, but now we have the second puzzle of where did this e.coli, or the EHEC as they call it, a form of e.coli, come from that’s sickening now hundreds of people, and killed more than a dozen so far.  So, where are the scientists looking right now?

BLECH: I think they really have to go back to try to find the source.  They don’t know, it was a big surprise to hear today the news, and I think now they really have to do their work again and talk to the patients.  At this point I think more than a thousand people are infected but not necessarily sick.  More than 370 are sick, and 16 already died, so I think they really check, but what these sick patients did in the past, what they ate, and really try to find a common parent.  One parent that turns out right now is that the source appears to be Northern Germany.

MULLINS: And does it appear to be vegetables from Northern Germany?

BLECH: That can not be confirmed.  They just say that you have a cluster of patients pointing to the city of Hamburg, and that you know that people who’ve been visiting North Germany, and some of them went to Sweden that have the disease, too.

MULLINS: Could this come down to one person who got sick and then infected others?

BLECH: This is a possibility.  So, there’s one university in the German city of Münster, they have a very good lab and they’re really looking to the strains, and they look at the fingerprint of this particular strain to see where the source comes from, and I think if it turns out that all the bacteria causing these problems in these patients, if they turn out to be the very same strain, there could be something like one single source, yes.

MULLINS: What are the symptoms that these people are coming down with initially?

BLECH: They have diarrhea, but the really bad thing is that these bacteria, they produce a poisonous protein, a toxic protein, and this protein causes the kidney not to function any longer, and then you get a shock and then you can die from this.

MULLINS: So what determines whether or not one would possibly die from this?

BLECH: Older people, they are much more likely to die, because their immune system is weak, so quite a few are victims so far, they were in their 80s and 90s, but the new thing now is that some of the victims were in their 40s.

MULLINS: Some of the people were in their 40s, who have passed away from it?

BLECH: Yes, and there were some children, and they did not pass away, but they need dialysis because their kidneys cease to function and that’s a big problem now.

MULLINS: I wonder, Jörg, beyond what people can do individually, if you could gauge for us how people are reacting?

BLECH: Yeah, I would say that the population does not panic at all.  People stay calm, but obviously they follow the news and what happened in the last days, many people discontinued to eat vegetables regardless of whether they came from Spain or from Germany, or different countries.  I think that was the main reaction of the people.

MULLINS: All right, thank you very much Jörg Blech, thank you.

BLECH: Thank you.

MULLINS: Jörg Blech is a molecular biologist and a science reporter for the weekly ‘Der Spiegel’ in Germany.

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