Salmonella – Enteric Bacteria

00:01 and inhibit protein synthesis. Now let's move to salmonella. These are another strain of enteric bacteria that cause focal infection of the vascular endothelium, may cause bloody diarrhea as do some of the E. coli strains. These bacteria infect not just the gut, but a variety of other organs as well. They can infect the bones for example in patients with sickle cell disease causing osteomyelitis. Infections with salmonella are associated with nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. And then another consequence with different strains is called typhoid fever, in which we have systematic spread of the bacteria.

00:42 These salmonella strains are common members of the microbiome of many animals, for example chickens, cows and reptiles. Pet turtles often have these strains of salmonella in them, the turtles are fine, in fact all these animals are not affected by their presence, but there have been outbreaks of salmonella disease in children caused by contamination from pet turtles. You buy a pet turtle at a pet shop, you bring it home and you have a salmonella infection.

01:12 Eggs are often contaminated with salmonella and there have been food foodborne outbreaks of infection from egg products. Typhoid fever, another manifestation of salmonella infection, is often transmitted from a human carrier.

01:30 This can involve transmission via food or water, a very famous example of this kind of infection, typhoid fever, is typhoid Mary, she was a carrier of the bacterium, she was not sick and she was involved in food preparation and infected many, many people until it was discovered that she was the source of the infection. So typhoid Mary lived many years ago and the solution was to put her away in a room and not let her interact with anyone, which is not really satisfactory of course. But now we understand what's happening and we can take other measures to minimize transmission from these carrier individuals who still exist. So as you might guess, these infections are acquired by fecal-oral contamination, in the case of typhoid Mary for example, the bacteria, she's excreting them, if she doesn't have good hand hygiene, she's going to contaminate food preparation. Bacteria make their way to the intestine, they penetrate the mucosal barrier, they enter M cells as well as epithelial cells and they're carried through to the underlying tissues by endocytic processes. Bacteria make their way to lamina propria, which is again that space underlying the epithelial sheet, in the process sodium chloride imbalance is introduced so that diarrhea results and the bacteria then spread from the underlying spaces to the bloodstream. So this is not something that we see with the watery diarrhea strains, the spread from the initial site of infection, they're confined, but these salmonella strains can spread typically from the lamina propria, the bacteria enter mesenteric lymph nodes and then from there enter the bloodstream where they can spread. So these infections are associated with gastroenteritis and the production of cytokines and an influx of neutrophils, which attempt to clear the infection and of course as the neutrophils die, they release into the stool, which has pus in it. Typhoid fever is a kind of infection that involves dissemination of bacteria from the intestine using the mechanism that I just described, but there are also non-typhoidal systemic infections with salmonella that are caused by food acquired bacteria, which go beyond the lamina propria in the intestine, get into the bloodstream and spread to other tissues. These are not considered infections of typhoid strains of salmonella, they are non-typhoidal. So let's look at how typhoid causing strain survive and infect. So we take them up into the gut, as you can see on the top there, there is an incubation period shown by the dotted line, where the bacteria invade the small intestine, move to mesenteric lymph nodes and then enter the lymph system. They can replicate in macrophages, in various organs, so once they're in the blood they can spread to various organs, they are taken up into the organs, they can replicate in macrophages of the liver, the spleen other lymph nodes. This is an asymptomatic phase, part of the incubation period. Then these bacteria are released from the phagocytes into the bloodstream, this initiates a septicemia or a bacteremia and that again spread the infection to other organs and that release is associated with high fever. It's a typical sign of typhoid fever. Once the bacteria are in the blood for this second phase, they can invade the gallbladder, and from there they can go on and re-invade other tissues, but the gallbladder is an important site, because this is often a place where chronic infection is maintained. From the gallbladder, of course, the bacteria can get out through the bile duct into the intestinal lumen and be shed, or they can re-invade tissues, cause ulceration of peyer patches in the gut mucosa, be released into the stool and can be present in the urine as well. So there's a cycle here that you can see from the initial infection, multiple releases into the bloodstream and other organs and then release and reinfection as well. This gastroenteritis can be treated with antibiotics, but the use of fluoroquinolones in treatment of this disease is controversial and if you read the literature, you'll see people who believe you should treat or you should not. The systemic non-typhoidal infections, non-typhoidal meaning not salmonella typhi. These require antimicrobial therapy; of course in all cases when there is diarrhea, you also have to have oral rehydration therapy. Typhoid fever itself caused by salmonella typhi is very difficult to treat. People who are carriers of the infection cannot, the bacteria cannot be eliminated with antibiotic treatment, so they have to be very careful not to contaminate others with the bacteria in them. So we've now gone.