Most people forget, or choose not to think about it, but food and water can be weapons of mass distruction.

Sweden may just have experienced a little taste of this possibility.   At a minimum, Sweden joins the club of those areas that have found out food and water can be used to deliver poison on purpose to people.

Other examples include:

  • The 751 people in Wasco County, Oregon—including 45 who required hospital stays—who in 1984 ate at any one of ten salad bars in town and were poisoned with Salmonella by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. The goal was to make people who were not followers of the cult too sick to vote in county elections.
  • Chile, where in 1989, a shipment of grapes bound for the United States was found laced with cyanide, bringing trade suspension that cost the South American country $200 million. It was very much like a 1970s plot by Palestinian terrorists to inject Israel’s Jaffa oranges with mercury.
  • The 111 people, including 40 children, sickened in May 2003 when a Michigan supermarket employee intentionally tainted 200 pounds of ground beef with an insecticide containing nicotine.
  • The former KGB agent, Mr. Litvenenko, poisoned in the UK with polonium-laced food.

The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise may be the latest such victim.  The target was the Confederation’s cafeteria  At least 140 people have been sickened with dysentery, caused by the Shigella dysenteriae bacteria.    The sick include employees and members of the confederation and guests.

Sapo, Sweden’s security service, is heading up the investigation into the outbreak since a left-wing group claimed responsibility for it on a website.

The Stockholm-based Confederation of Swedish Enterprise is an association for business and industry in Sweden.  It has 48 member associations representing close to 55.000 member companies with more than 1.5 million employees.

 

Madison and Dane counties in Wisconsin are experiencing an outbreak of Shigella and Bill Novak at The Capital Times decided it was time to "give it to ’em straight."  For example:

The infection is usually passed from one person to another when the first person has improperly washed hands, then handled food or an object that gets contaminated with the bacteria, with the second person eating the contaminated food or handling the object.

Some sex practices can also increase the risk of infection, according to information from the public heatlh department.

The shigella bacteria can be present in the diarrheal stools of infected persons while they are sick and for up to a week or two weeks afterward.

The Madison area has seen 52 confirmed cases of shigellosis since July 1, compared to seven cases in the same time period last year. 

The cases reported ranged in age from a three-month-old infant to a 63-year-old.

For more about Madison, go here.

 

 

Andy Gammill at the Indianapolis Star reports a new strategy is underway in the Hoosier State’s capital city to combat the ongoing outbreak of shigella.  He reports that:

Ten months and 500 cases into a shigella outbreak, health officials are visiting every licensed child-care center in Indianapolis in a new effort to stop the spread of the bacterial infection.

The Marion County Health Department hasn’t had much success, despite asking doctors to test for shigella even when they don’t suspect it and visiting schools and child-care centers where infected children have been.

We’ve tried so many things," said Shandy Dearth, an epidemiologist with the department.

The visiting health workers will conduct on-site checks to see if child-care centers are as clean as they should be, Dearth said, and will teach staff and children about proper hand-washing techniques.

At least 70 child-care centers and 84 schools have reported at least one case of shigella since Sept. 23, 2007, when the outbreak began. Shigella is a bacterial infection transmitted by contact with feces, including small amounts not visible to the naked eye.

For more about Indy, go here.

As it turns out, there were eight cases of Shigella linked to the Oregon Country Fair.   We previously reported here, Oregon Country Fair Blamed For Shigella Outbreak, on two cases.

Oregon health officials are considering anyone sick with diarrhea for more than 48 hours and who attended the July 10-13 fair, and then became sick one to four days later as being part of the outbreak.  Go here for more.

The Westside Gazette, which serves the South Florida minority community, is out with a report on how Shigella is sweeping across the region.   The Gazette says:

Shigellosis — a potentially dangerous inflammatory disease of the bowel, and a cause of dysentary brought on by a group of harmful bacteria closely related to the Salmonella virus — is currently sweeping across Palm Beach County and South Florida with over-crowded minority and immigrant communities particularly impacted. At highest risk are infants and children as well as those with compromised immune systems.

After reporting on how a 13-year old Delray Beach girl is dealing with her bout with the bacteria, the Gasette adds this:

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), Shigella bacteria (for which there is no vaccine) can easily be passed from one “infected person to the next,” and is commonly transferred through contact with feces and/or contaminated food.

Restaurants and fast food establishments are especially vulnerable. It is also frequently contracted and spread by infants and toddlers who are not yet completely potty-trained, especially those in daycare centers. Anyone coming in contact with a toddler’s dirty diapers is particularly at risk. Similarly, the risk of dehydration and convulsions in babies is of particular concern to health officials.

Approximately 25,000 confirmed cases of shigellosis are recorded annually in the U.S. among adults and children. Many medical experts including some employed with the CDC suspect however, that there may be upwards of a half million cases in the U. S. each year, with no reduction in sight.

For the complete report on Shigella in South Florida, go here.

Shigella is a bacterium that belongs to a small group of pathogens (including E. coli O157:H7 and Cryptosporidium) that can infect the gut after the ingestion of relatively few organisms, and can cause sudden and severe diarrhea (gastroenteritis) in humans.  When ingested, Shigella bacteria penetrate the lining of the intestine, causing swelling and possibly causing sores to develop (Mayo Clinic, 2007, April 14).

Volunteer experiments have demonstrated that shigellosis – the illness caused by the ingestion of Shigella bacteria, which is also known as “bacillary dysentery” – can occur after ingestion of fewer than 200 bacteria (DuPont, et. al. 1989), making Shigella one of the most communicable and severe forms of the bacterial-induced diarrheas (Gomez, et.al. 2002).

Shigella is named after Kiyoshi Shiga, a Japanese scientist who discovered Shigella dysenteriae type 1 in 1896 during a large epidemic of dysentery in Japan (Keusch & Acheson, 1996).  Since that time, several types of Shigella bacteria have been discovered – S. dysenteriae, S. flexneri, S. boydii, and S. sonnei – all named after the lead workers who discovered them (CDC, 2005, October 13).

Shigella thrives in the human intestine and is commonly spread both through food and by person-to-person contact.  About 25,000 laboratory-confirmed cases of shigellosis are reported each year in the U.S. (Mead, et al., 1999); however, many cases go undiagnosed and/or unreported and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that 450,000 total cases of shigellosis occur in the United States every year (Baer, et al., 1999; CDC, 2005, October 13).

No group of individuals is immune to shigellosis, but certain individuals are at increased risk. Small children acquire Shigella at the highest rate. Persons infected with HIV experience shigellosis much more commonly than other individuals, but this may largely be due to an increased risk among men having sex with men (Baer, et al., 1999).

In developing countries, S. flexneri is the most predominant cause of shigellosis, but S. dysinteriae type 1 is the most frequent cause of epidemic and endemic disease.  In developed countries such as the United States, S. sonnei is the predominant cause of Shigellosis; S. sonnei is involved in over 75% of cases reported annually in the US (Keusch & Acheson, 1996).

Continue Reading What is Shigella?

You have only to look at the pictures (we don’t have ’em)  to know that a good time was had by all at this year’s Oregon Country Fair, held earlier this month near Eugene.   However, at least eight people left with something not so nice as a way to remember the free-living fair.

These are the folks who went away with Shigella, according to KGW-8 in Portland.

Health officials started with two confirmed cases of Shigella, but have since seen the number increase to eight.    They want to hear from others that might be part of this outbreak.   According to KGW:

To be considered part of the outbreak, people had to have been sick with diarrhea lasting more than 48 hours, attended the fair between July 10-13 and fallen ill between one and four days after attending the fair.

For more, go here.

 


 

 

Poor Ohio!   Its taken a brunt from the Nebraska Beef E. coli outbreak.  It’s had ten cases of Salmonella Saintpaul.   And, now its in the middle of a nasty outbreak of Shigella.

According to Channel 4 in Columbus, the NBC affiliate,  health officials have confirmed 148 cases of Shigellosis — an intestinal bacteria infection in the Ohio city.  And 114 of those were confirmed in the last week –with much of the bacteria being spread from family member to family member.

NBC 4 reported that:

The bacteria are spread by feces and also by young children who have diarrhea going into a public swimming pool.

Officials said it is particularly a problem in small backyard swimming pools that do not have filters or chlorine.

The effects of Shigella last about a week and those who are infected may need antibiotics to recover. But officials said, chances are that it will go away on its own after about one week.

Columbus and Franklin County’s Health Commissioners, advise the following practices to limit the spread of this infection:

  • Wash hands with soap carefully and frequently, especially after going to the bathroom, after changing diapers, and before preparing foods or beverages.
  • Dispose of soiled diapers properly
  • Disinfect diaper changing areas after using them
  • Undiagnosed children with diarrhea should stay home until diarrhea has stopped for 24 hours.
  • Supervise hand-washing of toddlers and small children after they use the toilet, especially in daycare centers and homes with children who have not been fully toilet trained.  
  • Do not prepare food for others while ill with diarrhea.
  • Keep kitchen work surfaces clean (area should be wiped down with a disinfectant such as diluted household bleach 1:10 dilution made fresh daily, Lysol* or anti-bactericidal wipes)
  • Individuals who have diarrhea should not go swimming in pools or water parks.
  • Strongly recommend day care centers eliminate the use of equipment and activities that involve the use of water such as kiddy pools that may act as a reservoir and vehicle for spread of enteric organisms like Shigella, Cryptosporidium and Giardia especially if any student or staff member has loose stool. 

Go here for latest on Shigella from NBC4.


When we reported earlier this year on the Shigella outbreaks being experienced by the Jewish communities of the Lower Hudson and Brooklyn in New York State, we did wonder if it might have something to do with religious or cultural practices.

Our last report, Shigella Outbreak In New York Spreads Across Hudson River can be found here.
And when we saw reports this week that Rockland County, New York has had 130 Shigella cases already this year, compared to about a dozen in all of last year; we went looking for more of an insider explanation.  

We found this by columnist Elliot Jager in The Jerusalem Post:

TAKE SHIGELLA, a bacteriological infection of the intestines, which recently spiked among the ultra-Orthodox Satmar sect in Brooklyn. The disease is spread when infected fecal matter contaminates food or water, which is why the local health department suspected poor hygiene as the cause.

It’s not that Satmar children don’t wash their hands after going to the toilet, the problem is they don’t necessarily use soap and hot water. Instead, they ritually wash by pouring cold water several times over each hand before reciting the Asher Yatzar prayer, which thanks God for the continuous daily miracle of the body’s proper functioning.

No one is suggesting that ritual washing, per se, is the problem, only that the process probably needs to be supplemented by soap and hot water. Fortunately, the public health authorities in New York City are clued into the possibility that group values can provide insights into the spread of disease. Having solved the mystery, they’ve now distributed pamphlets in Yiddish on personal hygiene.

Habits are always hard to break.   Jager’s "Power & Politics: From minyan anxiety to female modesty" can be found here.

For the latest from Rockland County, go here.

"Bacterial infection spreads through area" is the headline today in the Corpus Christi, TX Caller-Times.  The story by writer David Kassabian tells of the Shigella outbreak now occurring in Nueces and San Patricio counties in the Corpus Christi area.  According to the report:

Since Jan. 1, 68 cases of Shigellosis, a potentially serious diarrheal disease, have been reported in Nueces and San Patricio counties. Only one case was reported in 2007, according to the Regional Health Awareness Board.

Symptons of Shigellosis are diarrhea, which may contain blood, as well as fever, nausea, vomiting and cramps, according to a news release from the board.

"Usually Shigellosis goes away on its own after a few days, but antibiotics may speed recovery," said Dr. James Mobley, chair of the health awareness board. "Frequent hand washing is (the) most important step in fighting Shigellosis."

The story can be found here.

We also note that Corpus Christi is only 90 miles away from Karnes County, TX, which is also experiencing an unusually high number of Shigella cases.  We reported on that here.