Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O104:H4: An emerging important pathogen in food safety

In 2011, Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli O104:H4 resulted in a large outbreak of bloody diarrhea and hemolytic uremic syndrome (HUS) in Germany and 15 other countries in Europe and North America. This event raised a serious public health crisis and caused more than two billion US dollars in economic losses. In this review, we describe the classification of E. coli, the Germany outbreak, and the characteristics and epidemical source-tracing of the causative agent. We also discuss the genomics analysis of the outbreak organism and propose an open-source genomics analysis as a new strategy in combating the emerging infectious diseases.