题目：警告：一种新的致死性的大肠杆菌在英国传播
摘要：摘自 foodhaccp.com

  A NEW killer strain of the E.coli bug from continental Europe could soon be posing a serious public health threat in Britain, experts fear. The bacterium, Escherichia coli 026, is just as dangerous as the notorious 0157 version that can cause fatal food poisoning in children and the elderly - but it can slip through the standard test used to pick out 0157 from other bacteria. In November 1996, E.coli 0157 killed at least 20 elderly people in Wishaw, Lanarkshire, and made another 500 seriously ill after they ate contaminated meat products from John Barr butcher shop in the town. The incident - Britain worst 0157 outbreak - led to a report containing 32 safety recommendations and an E.coli taskforce was set up by the Scottish Executive. A recent outbreak of E.coli 026 in Scotland, and findings from a study looking at cattle infection, alerted researchers to the potential new problem. Dr Mark Stevens, from the Institute for Animal Health, said: "026 appears to be much more prevalent in the UK than we previously thought. The likelihood is these bugs are going to enter the human food chain more often in the future. "E.coli 026 is here and we should be aware of it. The indications are that we cannot limit our sights only to 0157." Like other E.coli strains, 026 makes its home in the gut of cattle. It can spread to humans via faecal contamination of meat at slaughterhouses, and is a particular risk in undercooked hamburgers. Children playing on farms run the risk of picking up the bug by getting their hands dirty and not washing them. A survey last year showed that about 5 per cent of UK cattle carried E.coli 0157. Almost a half of all herds had at least one animal infected with the bacterium. Dr Stevens, who is developing a cattle vaccine against E.coli, will present new findings at a meeting of the Society for General Microbiology in Manchester today. He said earlier this year that four people from Scotland were found to have been infected by E.coli 026 bacteria. A fifth had acquired a rarer strain called 0113. The patients were from the Ayrshire and Arran health board area, the Forth Valley region, Lothian and Tayside. A team led by Professor Gad Frankel, from Imperial College London, recently reported the new cattle study in the journal Letters of Applied Microbiology. The scientists detected 132 suspect E.coli 026 isolates in 745 samples of cattle faeces from a single Scottish farm. Of these, 85 per cent were confirmed as being the 026 strain. Dr Stevens said 026 was already well known in continental Europe, and proving a particular problem in Germany. But up to now there had been little sign of it in the UK. "For reasons we don抰 really understand, different types of this class of E.coli are prevalent in different countries," he said. "The one you mostly have in North America and the UK is 0157." Although sophisticated antibody techniques can detect 026, it cannot be identified with the simple culture test normally used to spot 0157. There is a danger, therefore, that 026 might be allowed to spread unseen. However, Dr Stevens?team has made significant progress towards an effective answer to all kinds of E.coli. The group has identified 60 genes needed by the bug to survive in cattle intestines. Dr Stevens, who will outline the results at today meeting at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, said the scientists were looking at ways of using the new information to combat the bacteria. They had developed a vaccine designed to trigger an immune response against a particular E.coli protein, he said. It is hoped the vaccine will kill the bacteria in the living cow and make it far harder to pass to humans.