Human being has desires like many other creatures. Eating desire is one of the major ones that takes place daily during life. The type and quality of food we consume will eventually put its own effect on our physical and mtal health. People around the world have various kinds of diets. Each diet might be driven or set by determinants throughout history of each society; these determinants include natural resources, culture, religion, disaster experience, etc. It is interesting to me to understand the role of some of these determinants and how truly affect human’s mood or general behavior. Questions like, why some people don’t mind eating raw meat while some others do? If it is better to consume the meat in raw, would more people start eating it as part of their diet? Would they accept in the first place? What would happen to their health if they did? Are we sure that raw meat is completely hygienic? Does it have to be 100% hygienic or, in other words, pathogen-free? How would our immune system naturally improve without reasonably expose it to “known and new pathogens”?… etc; such questions and more are my driving engine throughout this research which requires application of advanced biomedical technologies and multidisciplinary approach to eventually answer all the above questions, and aims at improving our day-to-day life.

EHEC is a group of Escherichia coli strains represented by its most frequently detected O serotype “O157”. It is characterized by the presence of both Shiga toxin (stx) and E. coli attaching and effacing (eae) genes. EHEC O157 is a big threat to the people in developed countries because of its lethality among small children due to kidney failure. According to the result of our literature analysis, not only the E. coli strains belonging to serotype O157 but also those belonging to 14 other O serotypes (non-O157) are potentially capable of causing an outbreak of EHEC infection somewhere in the world, if they carry necessary virulence factors,
although their frequencies may not be as high as that of O157. We established a specific, very sensitive, and easy-to-do method for qualitative detection of EHEC from meat that is performable even in tropical countries
without solid lab facility and that is applicable globally owing to an immunomagnetic separation system specific to the 15 O serotypes. This method was validated in different parts of the world like Indonesia, Thailand and Lebanon. We were able to quantitatively determine the level of contamination by EHEC in beef and validate our detection method in these regions as a potential standard detection method for EHEC and ready to expand the study to other regions in the world for more validation.