As well as the organizational mismanagement of the recent Escherichia coli outbreak in Germany (Nature 474, 251; 2011), the technical underdevelopment of the country's medical microbiology institutes is staggering, given that Germany is the largest economy in Europe. Such shortcomings leave the country unprotected against attacks by highly virulent agents of natural or bioterrorist origin.

For example, none of these institutes is set up for rapid sequencing or mass screening of major pathogenic agents using the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Most of the labs still rely solely on Robert Koch's lengthy culture methods, even though analysis of a known pathogen could be reduced to a few hours by using culture enrichment combined with high-throughput real-time PCR. Such an analysis during the recent outbreak would have increased the number of samples tested and probably saved lives.