As president of the German Society for Hygiene and Microbiology, I object to Rainer Fislage's claim that the recent Escherichia coli outbreak exposed a technological gap in Germany's medical-microbiology infrastructure (Nature 475, 174; 2011).

Many university and government institutes contributed to a huge, rapid nationwide effort to identify the infectious agent, using a combination of field epidemiology, molecular typing and high-throughput genomics. For example, the Institute for Hygiene at the University of Münster is part of a national network of microbiology reference centres and consulting laboratories appointed by the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin. Institute director Helge Karch and his team used molecular tools to identify the outbreak strain and determined its multilocus sequence type within 48 hours of receiving the first stool samples.

Five days later, they posted a polymerase chain reaction assay on their website (http://www.ehec.org) that enabled the scientific community and public-health laboratories to differentiate the outbreak clone from other enterohaemorrhagic E. coli. Four days after that, they submitted the first draft genome sequence of an outbreak isolate to the US National Center for Biotechnology Information (see http://go.nature.com/tjdrth and A. Mellmann et al. PLoS ONE 6, e22751; 2011). They have also published three in-depth analyses of the latest outbreak strain. Scientists at the Göttingen Genomics Laboratory also swiftly generated and analysed another draft sequence (E. Brzuszkiewicz et al. Arch. Microbiol. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00203-011-0725-6; 2011).

There are lessons to be learned from the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak, and adjustments to be made to improve preparedness. But technology gaps were not a relevant problem in its handling.