Surveillance & Analysis on Shigella News & Outbreaks
WSAV reported on a Shigella outbreak in Effingham, Georgia, on Friday:
A number of Effingham County students are suffering from a bacterial infection in their digestive systems.
Health officials in the Coastal District say it is common to find shigellosis infections this time of year, but they are seeing a larger number of cases in
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How can a Shigella infection be prevented?
The spread of Shigella from an infected person can be stopped by frequent and careful hand washing with soap and water.[11] The ill individual should practice this, as well as any contacts. Supervised hand washing of all children should be followed in day care centers and as soon…
According to the Lexington Herald-Leader, many of the shigellosis cases during Lexington’s 2005 day-care outbreak were resistant to multiple first-line antibiotics.
Yesterday’s MMWR, a publication from the Centers for Disease Control, included a report on antibiotic-resistant Shigella outbreaks in Kentucky, Kansas, and Missouri. The outbreaks were all caused by multi-drug-resistant strans of the…
AP Medical Writer Marilynn Marchione, wrote about the recent decline in foodborne illnesses, as reported by the CDC. She spoke with several scientists and regulators from the food industry about the reported declines.
"The meat and poultry industry has made great strides. The produce industry has a long way to go to catch up," said Michael Doyle, a microbiologist who heads the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety.
Ms. Marchione wrote in the context of the recent E. coli outbreak traced to spinach from the Salinas Valley:
The spinach sickened 187 people in 26 states, hospitalized 97 of them and killed one. Outbreaks typically are far larger than the number of lab-confirmed cases reported to federal officials, Tauxe noted.
Germs in food make 76 million Americans sick, send 323,000 to hospitals and kill 5,000 each year, the CDC estimates.
But the situation greatly improved over the last decade, according to illness statistics the agency reported Friday at a conference of the American Society for Microbiology.
In 2005, compared with the 1996-98 period when the CDC’s FoodNet tracking system began, illnesses were down for virtually every major germ.
CDC estimates the declines as follows: yersinia, 49 percent; shigella, 43 percent; listeria, 32 percent; campylobacter, 30 percent; the dangerous O157 strain of E. coli, 29 percent; and salmonella, 9 percent.
The Chiefland Citizen reported on September 27, 2006 that:
A Sept. 14 letter distributed to parents of Chiefland Elementary School children warns of a disease known as Shigella, which can go undetected for seven days and the carriers of the disease may not show symptoms.
Those symptoms are: watery, bloody or loose stool, fever, and headache or cramps.
Shigella is spread from person-to-person, or by eating or drinking contaminated food or beverage, or by touching a contaminated object, according to the letter by Elizabeth Powers, R.N., with the Levy County Health Department.
Levy County Health Department Administrator of Health Barbara Locke, R.N., M.P.H., said Shigella is a fecal-oral bacterial infection of the intestines.
Continue Reading Parents alerted about disease found at Chiefland Elementary
