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- LONDON (Reuters) - A bacterium used as a natural pesticide on food and
feed crops could cause serious infections in people, according to a report
Wednesday. Bacillus thuringiensis helps plants naturally resist agricultural
pests, but New Scientist magazine said French doctors had discovered it
could harm humans after a soldier wounded in Bosnia developed a serious
infection from a sub-type of the bacterium. Scientists at the World Health
Organization and the Pasteur Institute in Paris identified the harmful
sample of the bacterium as H34. When Eric Hernandez, a microbiologist at
a military hospital near Paris, injected the strain into mice with weakened
immune systems he found the bacteria became dangerous when exposed to blood.
``We think they destroy the walls of blood cells,'' Hernandez told the
magazine. Most farmers spray their crops with different strains of the
bacteria but French scientists have identified another strain used in commercial
farm sprays that is also dangerous. Ecogen Inc, the U.S. company that markets
the sprays, insists they are safe because the bacteria are not exposed
to blood and not primed to infect wounds. ``There's such a long history
of safe use since the 1960s,'' Ecogen's research director Jim Baum told
the magazine.
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