It Takes Shoe Leather to Track the 'Smoking Gun'

The German E. coli outbreak is demonstrating the difficulty of identifying a “smoking gun” in outbreaks of foodborne illness. Some are asking, “Where is the evidence?” By “evidence,” I believe they mean identifying the outbreak strain of bacteria in a food source that is genetically identical to clinical isolates by Pulse-Field Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE). There is another kind of evidence that is just as important … it’s the evidence provided by shoe-leather epidemiology. Shoe-leather epidemiologists…