Mineral quashes deadly bacterial poisons
In animals, manganese shows promise fighting a hemorrhagic E. coli toxin
By Janet Raloff
A simple mineral supplement — manganese — holds promise as the first successful treatment for hemorrhage-inducing infections caused by some food- and waterborne germs. The mineral helps detoxify Shiga toxin, which is produced by a host of bacteria, including the type of E. coli that killed scores and sickened more than 3,700 people in Europe last year.
The new work, by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, appears in the Jan. 20 Science.
Although the data are preliminary, “it’s an exciting finding,” says microbiologist Vernon Tesh of the Texas A&M Health Science Center in Bryan, who did not participate in the new study. Manganese might soon offer a low-cost treatment that physicians could administer “to every patient that comes into the clinic with a bloody stool,” he says.
“That would be a tremendous boon,” he adds, because although antibiotics can wipe out germs responsible for these infections, such drugs are strongly discouraged. Killing the bugs only expedites their release of Shiga toxin, increasing a patient’s risk of kidney failure, stroke and death.