Doctor Offers Primer on E. Coli Bacteria

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ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

How common is an outbreak of E. coli and how does the current outbreak, the one that's related to spinach, compare to other outbreaks?

We're going to put those questions and others now to Dr. Patricia Griffin, who is acting chief of the Enteric Diseases Epidemiology Branch of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. And enteric diseases means E. coli is your beat.

Dr. PATRICIA GRIFFIN (Centers for Disease Control): That's right.

SIEGEL: How common is E. coli?

Dr. GRIFFIN: Well, we estimate that back in 1999 that there were about 73,000 E. coli cases in the United States every year. We've been fortunate in that the number has been decreasing over the past few years, but we still investigate about 25 E. coli 0157 outbreaks every year.

SIEGEL: We're talking about an outbreak here that's in the low triple digits.

Dr. GRIFFIN: That's right.

SIEGEL: Why are we hearing so much about it, then, if there are so many cases of E. coli?

Dr. GRIFFIN: Well a lot of the cases are sporadic, meaning they're not linked with each other and the source of the illness is not found. So whenever we find an outbreak - and that means two or more people with the same strain due to the same source - we try to find out that source so that we can remove it from the marketplace and figure out how it got contaminated so that we can prevent that from happening in the future.

SIEGEL: And when you find yourself in that situation, doing such an investigation, how common is that each year say?

Dr. GRIFFIN: We have about 25 of them in the United States every year.

SIEGEL: Twenty-five a year. In terms of how - I know I'm medically misusing the term, but how virulent this particular strain is, how bad is it?

Dr. GRIFFIN: E. coli 0157 in general is a very virulent bacteria. You'd need only a few organisms to make you very sick and there's no specific treatment. There's no treatment that you can give that will make the illness go away.

SIEGEL: To what do you and others at the Centers for Disease Control attribute what you say has been a general decline over the past several years in the number of E. coli outbreaks?

Dr. GRIFFIN: We don't know why they've declined. Some of the possible reasons are that the fast food industry has learned to cook hamburgers very well, even though ground beef can still be contaminated with this organism.

And in the past few years, the ground beef industry has worked very hard to decrease the amount of ground beef that's contaminated with E. coli 0157, and so we think that the ground beef in supermarkets is safer than it used to be. But that's still an important source of infections and it's still very important to cook your hamburgers very well.

SIEGEL: If somebody has no symptoms right now of anything but knows that they had a spinach salad two days ago, what should they do?

Dr. GRIFFIN: They should relax and not do anything. Except if they have that spinach still in their refrigerator, they should throw it away.

SIEGEL: And that would go for any spinach that anyone in the United States today has in the refrigerator?

Dr. GRIFFIN: Any raw spinach. Now if that person develops diarrhea, they should see their healthcare provider right away and get that spinach bag out of the trash and arrange to send it to the health department.

SIEGEL: Well, Dr. Patricia Griffin, from the Centers for Disease Control, thank you very much for talking with us.

Dr. GRIFFIN: You're very welcome.

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