Study finds meat bacteria behind half a million UTIs in the US every year

Women have urinary tract infections up to 30 times more often than men do, according to the Office on Women’s Health.

85 percent of UTIs are caused by E. coli, and eight percent of these are from meat

The important question is how did E.coli contaminate the meat. When food animals are slaughtered, the bacteria that live in their guts, including E.coli, can defile the meat products and put people at risk. 

Between January 2012 and December 2012, the researchers analyzed data from retail meat samples. They looked at 1,188 samples of E.coli from humans and 1,923 samples from meat that included chicken, turkey, and pork purchased from Flagstaff, Arizona. Urine and blood E.coli isolates were collected from patients hospitalized at Northern Arizona Healthcare’s Flagstaff Medical Center for urinary tract infections.

The research team identified segments of E.coli DNA "unique to strains that colonize food animals versus humans, then developed a new predictive model to differentiate E. coli from the two sources," the release said. It was then estimated that 85 percent of UTIs are caused by E. coli, and eight percent of these infections are from meat.

Shockingly, the foodborne E.coli strains identified were not only associated with UTIs but can also cause serious kidney and bloodstream infections. 

The study suggests that the FDA can do a more efficient job of monitoring dangerous pathogens in food and raw meat sold in the country. Consumers can also take steps to limit their exposure and intake of contaminated food.

The study is published in the journal One Health.

Study Abstract:

A one-health perspective may provide new and actionable information about Escherichia coli transmission. E. coli colonizes a broad range of vertebrates, including humans and food-production animals, and is a leading cause of bladder, kidney, and bloodstream infections in humans. Substantial evidence supports foodborne transmission of pathogenic E. coli strains from food animals to humans. However, the relative contribution of foodborne zoonotic E. coli (FZEC) to the human extraintestinal disease burden and the distinguishing characteristics of such strains remain undefined. Using a comparative genomic analysis of a large collection of contemporaneous, geographically-matched clinical and meat-source E. coli isolates (n = 3111), we identified 17 source-associated mobile genetic elements – predominantly plasmids and bacteriophages – and integrated them into a novel Bayesian latent class model to predict the origins of clinical E. coli isolates. We estimated that approximately 8 % of human extraintestinal E. coli infections (mostly urinary tract infections) in our study population were caused by FZEC. FZEC strains were equally likely to cause symptomatic disease as non-FZEC strains. Two FZEC lineages, ST131-H22 and ST58, appeared to have particularly high virulence potential. Our findings imply that FZEC strains collectively cause more urinary tract infections than does any single non-E. coli uropathogenic species (e.g., Klebsiella pneumoniae). Our novel approach can be applied in other settings to identify the highest-risk FZEC strains, determine their sources, and inform new one-health strategies to decrease the heavy public health burden imposed by extraintestinal E. coli infections.