Ruminants are not a reservoir of enteroaggregative Escherichia coli

Abstract

Enteroaggregative Escherichia coli (EAEC) causes both acute and persistent diarrhoea among children and adults in developing and developed countries. In addition, the large outbreak of food-borne illness in Europe in the summer of 2011 was caused by a verotoxin-producing EAEC O104:H4 strain. The public health threat posed by EAEC makes it important to identify animal reservoirs that might lead to epidemics in humans. Based on only one study in sheep and a few in cattle, researchers have suggested that EAEC are not found in ruminants. To expand the available data on this question, the present study applied polymerase chain reaction to faecal samples from 920 cattle, sheep and goats to detect EAEC. None of the samples tested positive for any of the EAEC genes tested, suggesting that goats, like cattle and sheep, are unlikely to be a significant reservoir of EAEC.