A highly infectious new strain of E.coli bacteria is causing a deadly outbreak of food poisoning that is spreading from Germany across Europe, scientists said on Thursday, raising alarm bells world-wide. Experts in China, part of a global network of laboratories racing to understand the sickness which killed a 17th victim overnight, said they had found the bug carried genes that made it resistant to several classes of antibiotics.
The UN said the strain had not infected people before. With more than 1,500 people already ill in one of the worst recorded outbreaks of E.coli, Russia prompted international recriminations by banning imports from the European Union of raw vegetables, thought to be the likely source of infection.
"This E. coli is a new strain of bacteria that is highly infectious and toxic," said the Chinese scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute in Shenzhen city. At the World Health Organisation, the United Nations health watchdog, a spokeswoman said: "This strain has never been seen in an outbreak situation before." Holger Rohde, a bacteriologist at Hamburg University Hospital, which has been at the epicentre of the sickness first reported last week said: "We have detected that it is indeed a new, not yet described, variant of this pathogen.
"We will be able to draw conclusions from this in future." Cases have been reported in at least 10 European countries and the United States, although almost all those outside Germany are in people who had recently been there. Moscow had already banned imports of vegetables from Germany and Spain because of the infections, which German officials originally blamed on contaminated cucumbers imported from Spain before backtracking and apologising to Madrid.
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