Escherichia Coli is another small internal pal, one who is all too glad to be carried by you, and occasionally exchanged with others you meet.
If you are alive at all, your tummy is teeming with little guys like these. In fact, they're part of everyone, and we couldn't live without some of them.
In this case "everyone" means warm-blooded animals. And "part of" means that they live in our poop, while it's still inside us, even before we part ways with it.
Normally E. coli is quiet and friendly and causes no harm at all, but bacteria tend to get into all kinds of mischief if left unsupervised long enough. E. coli (let's just call it Coli) is one of these.
And it isn't really Coli's fault. It's the way nature works. Nature is a real mess, and endlessly complicated, which is why, every now and then, you'll see someone just go nuts, and stand up somewhere and start screaming and ripping out handfuls of their own hair. Those are usually biologists. Life is tough for them. Complicated. Frustrating. Frequently smells bad. One reason I went into physics.
But if you like you can skip the personal recriminations and blame everything on bacteriophages. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect bacteria. Yes, life is complicated. Eat or be eaten. Infect or be infected. Or, in the words of that long-ago sign in the shop window, "Dick Nixon before he dicks you."
Bacteria infect us, and viruses infect us, and viruses infect bacteria. One bites one and and then another, and so on ad infinitum.
But the deal is, there is another bacterium out there, called "shigella", that happens to make a really nifty poison called "shiga toxin".
You can get your own personal shigella (call it Shiga) infection too, if you like, but you won't like, because of this shiga toxin, which is one of the most deadly poisons known. Just a bit of it causes bloody diarrhea and hemolytic uremic syndrome. (Yikes! How nasty!)
You can imagine the bloody diarrhea part (like who can't), but maybe not the hemolytic uremic syndrome part.
Hemolytic uremic syndrome is a disease that destroys red blood cells and the linings of blood vessels. Your blood loses the ability to clot. And then your kidneys die. And there is no treatment, other than to drink water and hope.
But you die anyway, so you can skip the hoping and just save your strength for the dying.
Shiga toxin is so evil that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider it a potential bioterrorist agent. (Got any clues yet?)
So hey, you don't want no Shiga.
The kinky part is that bacteriophages (jumping back to bacteriophages) go around sucking on random bacteria and transferring DNA from one of them to another, like from Shiga to Coli for instance, and then Coli is able to make its own shiga toxin.
And then you eat some stray, now deadly Coli.
This does in fact happen, and is why people get deathly sick (and quite a lot of the time the deathly part wins) when they eat contaminated food.
So cook food well, don't share food with others from a common bag, and wash your hands.
Watch that others do these things too.
You don't want severe cramps followed by a day of watery diarrhea, followed by two to five days of bright red bloody stools, followed by death. Do you?
Probably not. Not you.
Me? Currently making the transition from old creepy guy to creepy old guy.
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See if that helps.