Transcripts
DR. LINGWOOD:
Now, the source of the infection
is as we said, cattle. Cattle are the
host organism, the reservoir if you like, and
they don't seem to be affected, there's no real
pathology.
And I like to show this slide
particularly in the US because when HUS was
first identified it was targeted as a Canadian
disease; it was only found in Canada, Canadian
cattle. And that was because, as the speaker
before me pointed out, the infrastructure in the
public health system was there in Canada to
identify the situation and not so strong in the
states at that time.
And therefore we were
identifying VTEC in our cattle. And therefore
it was thought to be a Canadian cattle problem
and truckers were blocking the border access
points.
Anyway, that has all been
solved. But cattle in the USA do remain the
prime cause of contamination, fecal contamination.
But the question is: Why don't cattle suffer
from any disease?
There was a paper published
recently stating that the toxin -- the cattle
don't have the receptors for the toxin in the GI
tract and that's why they don't suffer from the
disease.
Actually, this is wrong, and the
reason it's wrong is because these investigators
haven't understood about glycolipids being
particularly difficult to work with in these kind
of tissue immunohistochemical stainings. They
actually used inappropriate methods for fixing
the sections, which remove the glycolipids, so
results became negative.
