Just what I wanted to learn, right before Thanksgiving.

Some of you might recall, in the late-late '80's, or else the early '90's, a food-contamination scare in the Northwest, nicknamed "Crap-in-the-Box" for the outbreak's link to the Jack-in-the-Box restaurants. The culprit was a strain of the otherwise benign bacterium, Escherichia coli, a commensal organism that lives happily in our intestines and doesn't cause us any trouble normally.

This particular strain, dubbed E. coli O157:H7, is a particularly nasty customer, carrying a collection of toxin genes from other such notable troublemakers as Salmonella typhimurium, Shigella, and Campylobacter jejuni. In the very old and the very young, this strain induces such violent diarrhea that it can cause intestinal bleeding, and thus escape into the bloodstream. Once in the bloodstream, O157:H7 will do lethal damage to the kidneys, and cause death through kidney failure.

Guess what, my good little boys and girls?

On Monday, we popped the lid on the lab's first vial of the stuff.

Now, I'm a healthy, normal adult. I really can't get terribly sick from this bug, though I would be uncomfortable for a few days. I can get this stuff on my skin and not worry about it (unless I've a significant break, like a cut or a sore), and gut pathogens really only cause trouble when they're ingested in large quantities. But if you think that's going to happen, anytime soon, you are thankfully most gravely mistaken.

Sometimes being a scientist really rocks. Sometime it really sucks. This one's more of the latter than the former...