A recent article by Lindsay and others reported that stool quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR), with a 14,000 copy number cutoff, identified more cases of Shigella infection than conventional and widely used culture methods. The authors suggested that there may be a significant underestimation of the contribution of Shigella to diarrheal disease because of the limits of culture and ha...

Host resistance to Shigella infections can be decreased by non-specific physical stress. Fasting lowers the number of Shigella required for a parenteral LD(50) dose. While the LD(50) by the oral route is larger in fasted than in nonfasted animals, the fasted host's susceptibility to oral infection is increased as evidenced by the increased fecal Shigella carrier state, duration of intestinal in...

The clinical course for a patient with symptomatic urinary tract infection due to Shigella sonnei is described. The role of Shigella spp. as urinary pathogens is reviewed.

A multiple-drug-resistant shigella was first isolated in Japan by Kitamoto et al.' from a patient with dysentery who had just come back from Hong Kong in 1955. This strain was resistant to 4 drugs ; sulfonamides, streptomycin, chloramphenicol, and tetracycline. It was not known at that time that these multiple drug resistances were transmissible from one organism to another. No such strains had...

Faster detection of contaminated foods can prevent adulterated foods from being consumed and minimize the risk of an outbreak of foodborne illness. A sensitive molecular detection method is especially important for Shigella because ingestion of as few as 10 of these bacterial pathogens can cause disease. The objectives of this study were to compare the ability of four DNA extraction methods to ...

BACKGROUND Many facultative bacterial pathogens have undergone extensive gene decay processes, possibly due to lack of selection pressure during evolutionary conversion from free-living to intracellular lifestyle. Shigella, the causative agents of human shigellosis, have arisen from different E. coli-like ancestors independently by convergent paths. As these bacteria all have lost large numbers...

The global morbidity & mortality due to Shigella species is one of the major public health problems that accounts for thousands of deaths among the children’s below 5 years of age in many developing countries including Bangladesh. The present study was designed to isolate and characterize Shigella like organisms (Non-lactose fermenting colonies) by allowing biochemical characteristics, serology...

The histone-like nucleoid structuring protein (H-NS) has played a key role in shaping the evolution of Shigella spp., and provides the backdrop to the regulatory cascade that controls virulence by silencing many genes found on the large virulence plasmid. H-NS and its paralogue StpA are present in all four Shigella spp., but a second H-NS paralogue, Sfh, is found in the Shigella flexneri type s...

Shigella flexneri is the causative agent of bacillary dysentery in humans. Shigella invasion of epithelial cells is characterized by cytoskeletal rearrangements and formation of cellular projections engulfing the bacterium in a macropinocytic process. We show here that vinculin, a protein involved in linking actin filaments to the plasma membrane, is a direct target of Shigella during cell inva...