Isolation of Shiga-like toxin producing Escherichia coli (O157 and non-O157) in a community hospital

Importance of Testing Stool Specimens for Shiga Toxins

“…In the United States, the publicity of STNO157 cases (1,4,7,8) has been limited, contributing to an underestimation of its clinical importance. Moreover, the CDC did not underscore its importance until last year at the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.…”

Evaluation of the Duopath Verotoxin Test for Detection of Shiga Toxins in Cultures of Human Stools

“…From our experience and those of other investigators, the sensitivities of SMAC plates for the detection of STEC O157 isolates ranged from 60 to 100% (8,9,12). Four frozen stool specimens and one prospectively evaluated stool specimen which contained STEC O157 isolates did not reveal sorbitol-negative colonies on SMAC plates due to overgrowth by normal enteric organisms.…”

Enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli in human medicine

“…However, progress in the laboratory diagnosis of EHEC infections through techniques that detect stx genes and expressed Stxs that are common to all EHEC, have resulted in the identification of non-O157 EHEC, especially those of serogroups O26, O103, O111, and O145 as causes of HUS and diarrhoea throughout Europe (Caprioli et al, 1997;Eklund et al, 2001;Friedrich et al, 2002;Gerber et al, 2002;Morabito et al, 2002;Tozzi et al, 2003;Beutin et al, 2004;Wagner et al, 2004). Moreover, such strains have been also increasingly identified as human pathogens in North America (Park et al, 1996;Bokete et al, 1997;Mead et al, 1999;Fey et al, 2000;Klein et al, 2002;Jelacic et al, 2003), South America (Vaz et al, 2004), and Australia (Elliott et al, 2001). In fact, in Australia, non-O157 EHEC are even more commonly implicated in HUS than are E. coli O157:H7 (Elliott et al, 2001), and EHEC O111:NM are the leading precipitant of sporadic HUS cases (Elliott et al, 2001) and caused a large foodborne outbreak in 1995 in which more than 200 persons were affected and 22 children developed HUS (Paton et al, 1996).…”