"While most salmonella bacteria cause diarrhea and are rarely fatal, this one causes death in one of four cases among children and vulnerable adults in some African regions, the researchers said. Many of its victims have been weakened by the AIDS virus, anemia, malaria or malnutrition. Salmonella normally circulates in animals and reaches humans via food poisoning. (Consumer Reports said Monday that two-thirds of the chickens it had tested had campylobacter or salmonella, though not of this new strain.) But after sequencing the bacterial DNA found in about 50 Africans with severe infections, the researchers said the ST313 strain appeared to be mutating to circulate in humans independently of animals, as, for example, drug-resistant staph infections now do." - Steven Perez from Bookmarklet