ABSTRACT
BACKGROUND: Numerous residents of Shelby County, Alabama, were infected with Salmonella when a restaurant unknowingly served food tainted with the bacterium. Because of the similarity in symptoms caused by other gastrointestinal pathogens and the variability in time of presentation, an outbreak such as this could be confused with one of another pathogenic origin. The pathogen identified, Salmonella bredeney, is a particularly rare cause of food poisoning. It makes up only 0.1% of the Salmonella isolates identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) each year. METHODS: We analyzed patient presentations through chart review and combined this information with that obtained from the state laboratories in Montgomery and the Shelby County Health Department. RESULTS: Symptoms were mostly gastrointestinal and ranged greatly in severity. The total number of patients affected in this incident exceeded 170, making it the largest epidemic of its kind in the recent history of Alabama. CONCLUSIONS: The outbreak in Shelby County was caused by an exceedingly rare species of Salmonella. At this time, it is the only outbreak of S bredeney reported in MEDLINE-accessible literature since 1983.
Subject(s)
Disease Outbreaks , Gastrointestinal Diseases/microbiology , Salmonella Food Poisoning/epidemiology , Salmonella Food Poisoning/microbiology , Salmonella/classification , Adult , Aged , Alabama/epidemiology , Anti-Bacterial Agents/therapeutic use , Child , Gastrointestinal Diseases/drug therapy , Gastrointestinal Diseases/epidemiology , Humans , Middle Aged , Salmonella Food Poisoning/drug therapy , SerotypingABSTRACT
The Drosophila melanogaster E74A gene is expressed in response to the steroid hormone ecdysone. Its product is a site-specific DNA-binding protein that is believed to play an important role in the normal development and metamorphosis of the fly. In addition to being under the transcriptional control of ecdysone and its receptor, there is evidence for translational regulation of the E74A mRNA. The E74A mRNA 5' leader is unusually long (nearly 1.9 kb) and contains 17 AUGs, suggesting that translation of the mRNA would be rather inefficient. To identify features and sequences that might be important in regulating E74A translation, we determined the nucleotide sequences of the 5' leaders from the E74A-homologous genes of D. pseudoobscura and D. virilis, comparing them to D. melanogaster. Several conserved characteristics and specific sequences were identified. In addition to conservation of the relative distances separating the three E74A gene exons encoding the 5' leader, all three species have maintained the extensive length of the leader as well as multiple AUGs. Within the 5' leader are numerous conserved sequences, several of which are found at the two ends of the leader and at splice site junctions, where sequence conservation might be expected. A 53-nucleotide sequence element and a 30-nucleotide element in exon 2 are highly conserved and are proposed as candidates for an internal ribosome entry site (IRES) of the E74A mRNA.
