EHEC – what’s in a name?

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BY PAUL CARLINE

EHEC (“enterohaemorrhagic E. coli”) – a new label to conjure with, joining other fear-inducing abbreviations like TB, AIDS, CJD and BSE. At the time of writing, EHEC has affected some 3-4,000 people, mostly in Northern Germany, claiming some 36 victims among the more than 700 who developed the more serious, potentially lethal, HUS (haemolytic-uremic syndrome) form.

Under the headline “Doctors Shaken by Outbreak’s Neurological Devastation”, SPIEGEL Online (09/06/2011) reported that at first “doctors were most concerned about the kidneys of patients with EHEC. In the past week, however, it has become apparent that the neurological side-effects of the bacterial infection could be even worse”. The report quotes Daniel Wertheimer, head physician at a specialist neurology clinic in Hamburg: “We were all looking at the kidney symptoms at first, but perhaps EHEC will eventually go down in history as the pathogen that caused serious damage to the central nervous system. (…) Three weeks ago I would have said that 15 to 20 percent of the severe cases would develop neurological complications. Today I would say it’s about half”.

The doctors are seeing patients who have trouble finding words, can’t remember things, have extremely severe epileptic seizures or fall into a coma. “Neurologically speaking”, says Wertheimer,  “EHEC is like a chameleon”. E-Coli comes in many forms, almost all of them harmless. Like other bacteria (there are at least ten times as many bacteria in the human body than cells – and there are anything from 500 to 1000 trillion cells!), it is present in massive numbers (perhaps as many as 10 billion) in the body, especially in the large intestine. We simply could not live without them. Only a few of the many strains of E-coli cause problems – the most common recent culprit, responsible for 21 deaths in Scotland in 1996 and 12 in Japan in the same year (out of more than 10,000 people infected), is the O157.H7 strain.

But the O104.H4 strain responsible for the outbreak in Germany is different. It is far more toxic – and, as noted above, is causing serious neurological damage of a kind not seen in other outbreaks. Where normal E. coli infections produce only relatively mild symptoms (usually diarrhoea), the O104.H4 strain has somehow acquired the capacity to produce the so-called Shiga toxin, which only occurs when the E. coli is infected with a specific virus. The body’s immunological response to the Shiga toxin causes the walls of all blood vessels, including those in the brain, to become inflamed and swollen. When that happens, parts of the brain are no longer supplied with blood and are at risk of being irreversibly damaged. At the same time, the blood vessels become abnormally porous, allowing toxins to migrate into the organs. Pressure rises in the brain and can cause epileptic seizures.

Another unusual and worrying feature of the O104. H4 strain is that the bacteria have an extraordinarily high level of resistance to antibiotics. As The Guardian reported (05.06.2011):

“According to Germany’s  HYPERLINK “http://www.who.int/immunization_safety/safety_quality/rki/en/index.html” Robert Koch Institute, O104 is resistant to more than a dozen antibiotics in eight classes: penicillins; streptomycin; tetracycline; the quinolone nalidixic acid; the sulfa drug combination trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazol; three generations of cephalosporins; and the combination drugs amoxicillin/clavulanic acid, piperacillin-sulbactam, and piperacillin-tazobactam. Indifference to so many drugs signals that O104 possesses what is called  HYPERLINK “http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/InfectiousDiseases/InfectionsAZ/ESBLs/” ESBL resistance – and in fact, according to the Koch analysis, the strain harbors two genes that confer that resistance, TEM-1 and CTX-M-15 – a property that has been making doctors shudder since the 1990s, when strains of ESBL-resistant  HYPERLINK “http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/219907-overview” Klebsiella, a bacterium that causes serious hospital-acquired infections, began pingponging through Europe. […] Where are these resistance factors coming from? The development of resistance is an inevitable biological process; it’s what bacteria do to protect themselves against deadly compounds, whether the compounds were made naturally by other bacteria or artificially in a drug-development lab. But excessive exposure to antibiotics hastens the process and makes its results unpredictable.”

Helge Karch is the director of the Robert Koch Institute’s consulting laboratory at the University Hospital in Muenster. He has devoted almost his entire life as a researcher to EHEC bacteria. “But I’ve never encountered anything like this”, he says. The lab was one of the first to receive stool samples from patients. Two days after receiving the sample, Karch’s staff had identified the extremely rare O104.H4 serotype. It was so rare that Karch had only encountered it once in 30 years and an internet search turned up only one article – a case study from Korea. In the Korean case, as with most of the German cases, the victim was an adult woman, something that is completely atypical for EHEC. Karch contacted another leading American expert; he had also never heard of an O104.H4 outbreak.

After further intensive research, Karch discovered that the bacteria responsible for the German outbreak is a so-called chimera that contains genetic material from various E. coli bacteria. It also contains DNA sequences from plague bacteria, which makes it particularly pathogenic. It’s interesting that outside of the alternative media, this latter strange and worrying fact has not been commented on. The Guardian article quoted above is one of the very few mainstream reports that – by implication (“it’s what bacteria do to protect themselves against deadly compounds, whether the compounds were made naturally by other bacteria or artificially in a drug-development lab”) – raises the possibility that this new lethal strain could have been bio-engineered in a lab and either accidentally, or deliberately, released.

On 5th June, the German online newspaper WELT Online published an article entitled: “The four major theories about the cause of the EHEC outbreak”. The finger of suspicion is pointed at: 1) bio-gas production facilities; 2) contaminated water; 3) overuse/misuse of antibiotics; 4) terrorism.

Biogas

There are currently some 6800 biogas plants in Germany, both large and small. Biogas production has become a popular and profitable way of exploiting farm and other waste materials. As a rule, agricultural biogas plants use liquid manure as a base material. Renewable sources such as corn, cereal crops and other energy plants such as sunflowers, Sudan grass, oil radish, Sorghum bicolor etc. are increasingly being used to raise gas yields. Commercial plants also process wastewater (from purification plants) as well as waste from food production, food scraps, grease traps and slaughterhouse waste.

The extracted biogas is comprised of 55 to 70 percent methane, the energetically usable component. The gas also includes carbon dioxide as well as minimal amounts of hydrogen sulphide, ammonia and hydrogen. Aside from the biogas itself, a digestate is created – a mix of water, minerals and organic substances which have not decomposed. This by-product can be used as a high-grade fertiliser in agricultural uses, thereby closing the nutrient cycle with the cultivation of energy crops, or it can be sold as a mineral fertiliser.

The fermenting process of organic substances in an air and oxygen-free environment uses various anaerobic bacteria, the composition of which depends on their organic feed stock and specific process conditions (temperature and pH level). A decisive factor in the productivity of biogas plants is the microbiological processes that occur during fermentation. An Irish report notes: “Wastes of animal or human origin may contain a wide variety of pathogenic bacteria, parasites and viruses.  These may be disseminated along the pathways created by the systems of production, the routes of transport of live animals, and by the transformation, distribution and consumption of products of animal origin. The transport of animal manures, their mixing together in AD (anaerobic digestion) plants and the return of the treated, mixed effluent for landspreading on farmland creates new potential pathways for disease transfer.  The inclusion of abattoir and fish-processing wastes, sewage sludge and OF MSW (the organic fraction of municipal solid waste) in AD plant feedstocks potentially increases the diversity of pathogens that may be landspread and may enter the animal and human foodchains.”

Critics maintain that the conditions within the fermentation chambers, with ideal temperatures around 37 degrees C, encourage the development of new forms of bacteria resulting from blending and crossing. Up to 80% of the fermentation material – with the modified bacteria – can end up being spread as fertiliser on fields. It is claimed that there is insufficient monitoring and testing of a process which often includes animal dung, liquid manure and animal waste from slaughterhouses.

There are EU hygiene guidelines which state that the substrate has to be heated for an hour at 70 degrees, but doubts have been expressed as to whether all plants meet the EU standards and whether the required process actually removes all pathogens.

Contaminated water

It is suggested by some that the EHEC bacteria may have been transmitted to crops via irrigation water contaminated with faecal matter – for instance, if during a dry spell farmers used their slurry spreaders for irrigation without having cleaned them properly. However, this could not have been the cause of the current outbreak, since the beansprout farm at the centre of the epidemic used no fertilisers or chemicals of any kind and no animals were raised there.

Antibiotics

Microbiologist Professor Alexander Kekulé of the University Hospital in Halle, Germany, is convinced that the new E. coli strain has come into being as a direct consequence of the improper use of antibiotics – either in a hospital or through their use in animal husbandry. He says that the widespread use of antibiotics puts bacteria under strong selection pressure, accelerating evolutionary processes. E. coli bacteria are able to exchange genes in the intestine and he believes that this happened in the current case – either in a hospital patient, who then carried the mutated bacteria into the wider environment, or in a farm animal.

Terrorism

It is being suggested by some – including some reputable scientists – that terrorists might have engineered the new strain and used it to infect crops. But no terrorist group has claimed responsibility, and there are doubts that such groups would have the technical capability to create such a sophisticated strain. Nonetheless, the article warns, with such an atypical disease profile it would be foolish to dismiss out of hand the possibility that the disease agent had been deliberately engineered to kill and terrorise.

The latest reports (12.06.2011) unequivocally identify the products grown at the beansprout farm as the cause of the outbreak. But there are still no clues as to how the sprouts became contaminated.  The regional farm minister told a newspaper that as far as he was aware, the farm workers “had done nothing wrong” and that the farm had “high standards of hygiene”. The minister for the environment and consumer protection in the state of North-Rhine Westphalia stated yesterday that the authorities were “still the dark” as to how the sprouts became infected. The farm’s owner has been growing organic sprouts for 25 years and had been given a clean bill of health specifically in relation to E. coli as recently as the second half of May – more or less the same time as the first victims were eating their sprouts.

So the outbreak remains a puzzle. But despite the fact that no blame is being attached to the Gaertnerhof organic farm, there are already voices suggesting that organically grown food is inherently more dangerous than conventionally grown food. A Reuters article of 7.06.2011 notes:

“Even when it is contained, the outbreak will have done lasting damage to at least some conceptions about ‘healthy’ organic food. Adapting the smiley sun-logo of the German anti-nuclear lobby to oppose genetically-modified food, proponents of natural foods have seen the European organic market grow to 5.8 billion euros (by 2009). Just under a fifth of that comes from German farms. Yet some studies suggest organic food is risky, especially when eaten raw, because farmers shun chemicals and rely on fertilizers such as manure or slurry. The Shiga toxin-producing E. coli behind this outbreak are known to lurk in cattle guts”.

We may never know how those beansprouts became contaminated. But questions remain. Did this unique strain – never before seen – occur naturally through mutation and horizontal gene transfer? Is it possible for such a level of antibiotic resistance to develop naturally? How did the DNA from plague bacteria become incorporated? And most concerning of all the possible questions: does the evidence suggest that the lethal strain was bio-engineered somewhere in a laboratory?

E. coli has been studied for over 60 years. It is the most widely studied prokaryotic model organism, easily and inexpensively grown in the lab. It is the preferred host organism for the majority of the work carried out with recombinant DNA (genetically engineered DNA prepared by transplanting or splicing genes from one species into the cells of a host organism of a different species). We know that there are laboratories around the world – completely beyond democratic control – which work on producing both bio-weapons and possible defences against them. It would be reasonable to assume that E. coli is one of the bacteria which are being investigated as potential bio-weapons, due to its ease of manufacture and ability to be a carrier for the rapid dispersal of other pathogens.

It should not be forgotten that two years ago, when the bogus “swine flu pandemic” was being orchestrated, a laboratory worker in the Czech Republic discovered – by chance (though, as Rudolf Steiner often remarked, there is no such thing as chance) – that the swine flu vaccine distributed to labs across Europe by Baxter Pharmaceuticals had been contaminated with avian flu virus.  This is how one website reported it at the time:

“In a story that most media outlets have ignored the Big Pharma company Baxter International distributed contaminated vaccines for swine flu to Austria and three neighboring countries. The vaccines contained the H5N1 avian flu virus. The Czech Republic just happened to catch the contamination. They tested a batch on ferrets before shipping it out for injection into humans. All of the ferrets died! It was a major scandal. Had they injected humans, we could be facing a disease that could kill millions.

The word “contamination” suggests an accident. But according to the extremely strict procedures for vaccine production, the “accidental” presence of live avian flu in a swine flu vaccine is an impossibility. It is so remote that some Czech newspapers speculated that Baxter was trying to provoke a pandemic. Such a pandemic would help it reap untold billions in profits from producing the vaccine to counter a bird flu outbreak.”

The contamination was explained away as “accidental” – but live avian flu virus is classed as a bio-weapon and is subject to such stringent bio-security regulations that, as the article states, an ‘accidental’ contamination is simply impossible. But the story was not followed up. Could the E. coli outbreak be the result of another deliberate mixing of non-lethal and lethal elements, released in order to test the potency of the mix on a live population, or out of economic or political motives? Unfortunately, in today’s world, such possibilities cannot be ruled out.

Whatever the cause, questions need to be asked about the rationality of the mass production and transport across continents of foodstuffs, and the vulnerability of livelihoods and whole industries to  freak occurrences – whether natural or otherwise – and to political knee-jerk reactions. The cost of compensation to growers in several countries will run into hundreds of millions of Euros. There may be longer-term costs to public health if there is a shift away from fresh and organically grown produce. Beyond that, this outbreak has taken the lives of now 36, mostly young, people and left many more with serious, potentially lifelong side-effects. For their sakes in particular and for the sake of all of us, we really need to know what caused this bizarre outbreak. Perhaps we also need to insist on some form of public oversight of what is being done in our names in such places as Britain’s Porton Down – the UK’s chemical and biological warfare research centre.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Carline, was born in Eccles, near Manchester in Northern England.  Studied modern languages (German, Russian) at Manchester University.   Member of IRI Europe since the beginning. Mainly responsible for translating/editing/proof-reading all IRI Europe’s print and online publications. Other interests and activities: not party-political, but passionate about global justice and human rights; committed to exposing fake democracy and fake terrorism (the state-sponsored variety), which have been used to justify gross contraventions of international law and human rights and have cost the lives of millions.

cf. also: Mail Online, 07.06.2011: “Superbug timebomb: Scientists fear the overuse of antibiotics in medicine and farming may have led to the deadly E. coli outbreak”.  HYPERLINK “http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1395078/E-coli-outbreak-Over-use-antibiotics-led-deadly-strain.html?” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1395078/E-coli-outbreak-Over-use-antibiotics-led-deadly-strain.html?

HYPERLINK “http://www.ava1.de/botulinum/DS4_Colleran-1.pdf” http://www.ava1.de/botulinum/DS4_Colleran-1.pdf

In considering terrorism as a possible cause it would be important not to exclude corporate and political interest groups as potential sources of bio-terrorism i.e. of the planned creation of fear in the public, for example about the safety of certain foodstuffs or organic farming methods. A very recent poll in the UK reveals that almost 1 in 4 British consumers have altered their intake of fresh vegetables as a result of the German outbreak, and as many as 40% of young people in the 16-24 age group have given up or plan to give up eating cucumbers – despite there being no connection between them and the outbreak. Cf. also notes 4 and 5.

The declaration (by WHO) of the outbreak as a “pandemic” was only made possible by changing the standard definition to remove the criterion of large-scale mortality. The change was necessary to trigger the contracts which governments around the world had entered into with the vaccine makers and which reaped the latter vast profits.

cf.  HYPERLINK “http://healthydoctors.com/blog/swine-flu-h1n1-vaccine-from-baxter-international-is-contaminated/” http://healthydoctors.com/blog/swine-flu-h1n1-vaccine-from-baxter-international-is-contaminated/

SEE ALSO:

Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC)
http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs125/en/

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