Seven people in Britain have been infected with the E. coli bacteria which has killed 17 people in Europe, with all cases linked to Germany, health authorities said yesterday.
Three of those infected were British nationals who had recently travelled to Germany and four were German nationals, the Health Protection Agency said in a statement.
Of those cases three had full-blown haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) – a disease that can cause serious liver damage – and the other four suffered bloody diarrhoea, it said.
“All are suspected to be related to this outbreak” in Germany of Enterohaemorrhagic E. coli (EHEC), said the statement.
“There are no reports of any secondary infections in England,” it added.
Most of the deaths from the outbreak have been in Germany, where health authorities are desperately searching for the cause after Spanish cucumbers were wrongly blamed at first.
Dilys Morgan, a disease specialist at the Health Protection Agency, said it was monitoring the situation “very carefully”.
The agency urged people travelling to Germany to avoid eating raw tomatoes, cucumbers and leafy salad including lettuce.
Anyone returning from Germany with illness including bloody diarrhoea should seek urgent medical attention and mention their recent travel history, it added.
Meanwhile two labs said yesterday that the DNA of a bacterium behind a lethal E. coli outbreak in Germany pointed to a new strain of microbe whose genetic mix explained its remarkable virulence.
The genetic sequence indicates an “entirely new super-toxic E. coli strain,” Chinese lab BGI said, adding that it had also found evidence the microbe was resistant to antibiotics. BGI said the microbe was a new serotype – a term meaning a variation in a sub-species of bacterium – that was “not previously involved” in any Escherichia coli outbreaks.
In a press release issued from Shenzhen, southern China, BGI said it was working with the University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf in northern Germany, the epicentre of the outbreak which has claimed 18 lives and left more than 2,000 people sick.
Preliminary analysis shows the genome is 93 percent similar to an O104 strain of enteroaggregative E. coli, or EAEC, that had been isolated in the Central African Republic and was known to cause serious diarrhoea, the firm said.
But it also includes genes from a different E. coli strain called enterohaemorrhagic E. coli, or EHEC, it added.
HUS is a potentially life-threatening condition in which so-called Shiga toxins exuded by the proliferating germs lead to kidney injury or failure.
Russia banned European vegetable imports yesterday in response to the crisis, which has left hundreds of people ill, while Spain said it would seek compensation over being wrongly blamed.