date:Aug 06, 2012
The outbreak was a dramatic entrance to the world stage for the microbe at the center of it all, a little-known strain of E. coli known as O104:H4, that caused German authorities facing a nation of overwhelmed hospitals to declare on May 22, Clearly, we are faced with an unusual situation.
O104 managed to wreak such an unprecedented level of devastation in Germany thanks to evolutionary adaptations that combined the defensive traits of some harmless strains with the deadly traits of Shiga toxin