New approaches for severity intervention and rapid diagnosis of enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli: a review

Abstract

Enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli (EHEC) are important pathogenic E. coli characterized by the production of Shiga toxin, intimin, and enterohemolysin, which are important virulence factors for pathogenesis. These virulence factors are the cause of enterocyte extinction and affect both intestinal cells and various extraintestinal cells such as lymphocytes, granulocytes, erythrocytes, and renal cells. The resultant severe bloody diarrhea and colonic infections are associated with life-threatening extraintestinal complications, leading to high morbidity and mortality worldwide. Although EHEC has been responsible for large outbreaks around the world, research into effective therapies to prevent and treat the infection in a timely manner and affordable diagnostic tests remains a challenge due to the complicated nature of the bacteria. This review addresses previous studies, the current status, and prospects regarding the severity, treatment, and diagnosis of EHEC with a focus on a new finding on the use of simple point of care diagnostic procedures.

KEYWORDS:

• Diagnosis
• EHEC
• hemolytic syndrome
• Shiga toxin
• severity
• treatment

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the University of Gondar for allowing us to work in this area. Both authors have substantially contributed to the work reported. To list individual author contributions: DY was involved in conceptualizing, original draft writing, writing review and editing; YM was involved in writing review and editing, revising critically, data curating, validating. Both authors have commented, read, and approved the final manuscript as well as agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.