At the Matlab Hospital of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, the authors examined the blood groups of patients hospitalized between January and September 1979 for ...diarrheal disease due to a variety of bacterial and viral agents. A significant association was identified only for cholera, in which cholera patients were twice as likely to have blood group O and one-ninth as likely to have blood group AB as community controls. A follow-up study of family contacts of cholera patients, carried out between September 1980 and July 1982, indicated that blood group did not affect an individual's risk of having a culture-proven infection with V. cholerae 01 but was directly related to the severity of disease. Individuals with the most severe diarrhea compared with those with asymptomatic infection were more often of blood group O (68% versus 36%, p less than 0.01) and less often of AB (0% versus 7%, p less than 0.01). It was not possible to identify the molecular basis for this genetically related protection using biologic models of cholera that are currently available. The constant selective pressure of cholera against people of O blood group may account in part for the extremely low prevalence of O group genes and the high prevalence of B group genes found among the people living in the Gangetic Delta.
We compared the applicability of an enhanced chemiluminescent (ECL) method for using gene probes with that of radioactive probes to identify enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli (ETEC) in stools of ...Bangladeshi children with diarrhoea. Colony blots of E. coli isolates were hybridized using both α-32P-dCTP labelled and fluorescein-11-dUTP labelled polynucleotide and oligonucleotide gene probes for heat-labile enterotoxin (LT), and heat-stable enterotoxin (ST). Analysis of 1,620 isolates obtained from 540 patients gave similar results by both radioactive and chemiluminescent probes. The ECL method was faster than the radioactive method. Both polynucleotide and oligonucleotide probes could be used by the ECL method. Hybridization and detection by the ECL method appeared to be a convenient alternative to radioactive probes for screening E. coli isolates for ETEC.
Six hundred and seventy-five Escherichia coli isolates obtained from 225 diarrhoeal children less than five years of age were tested for adherence to HeLa cells and for hybridisation with DNA probes ...for genes conferring aggregative adherence (AggA), localised adherence (LA) and diffuse adherence (DA) to assess the usefulness of a recently developed DNA probe for AggA of enteroaggregative E. coli (EAggEC). The strains were further analysed with the DNA probes for heat-labile enterotoxin (LT), heat-stable enterotoxin (ST), Shiga-like toxins (SLT I and SLT II) and for enteroinvasiveness and adherent strains were all negative for these properties. The HeLa cell assay and DNA probe assays showed excellent agreement in identifying LA and DA positive isolates. However, significant disparities occurred in the case of AggA positive isolates, and the DNA probe failed to identify 31.9% (15 of 47) of the EAggEC identified by the HeLa cell adherence assay. The failure of the DNA probe to identify all the EAggEC indicated that there may be a high degree of genetic heterogeneity for the expression of AggA, and development of more DNA probes is necessary to detect all the possible genetic variants of EAggEC.
The protective role of human breast milk antibodies was examined by studying nursing mothers and their infants among family contacts of patients with cholera. These antibodies, measured at the onset ...of the study, were matched with the vibrio colonization and disease status, which were monitored each day for 10 days. The results suggest that the cholera-specific antibody present in human breast milk protects breast-fed infants and children against diarrhea (but not against colonization with vibrio cholerae 01). (wz)
