Suspected E Coli outbreak in Scottish nursery

A fifth child from a nursery in Dunfermline has suffered kidney failure following a suspected E

A fifth child from a nursery in Dunfermline has suffered kidney failure following a suspected E.coli outbreak, NHS Fife said this afternoon.

All five attended the Careshare Nursery and are being treated at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow.

The latest child is 21 months old and is one of around 100 children at the nursery.

Health officials are investigating whether a further seven children and one adult, linked to the same nursery, have also been infected with the bug.

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Dr Charles Saunders, a public health medicine consultant for NHS Fife, said experts was still investigating the cause of the outbreak.

Environmental swabs taken from the nursery have tested negative for E.coli.

"It's beginning to look less likely that it was a food or water source of infection," he told BBC television.

"What appears an increasingly likely probability is that the infection was brought into the nursery by an adult or child, and then the infection was transmitted to children in the nursery by person-to-person spread."

Staff and children will be allowed back to the nursery once they have been cleared as free of the bug, although it will take between 10 and 14 days for test results to come back.