The case for E. coli

In the midst of a long Freaky Trigger thread about canons, Mark had said "I think you can't make a Canon Of Everything," which I took as a challenge, with this result:
1. Dinosaurs
2. The wheel
3. The way she looked that summer
4. E. coli
5. A. Conan Doyle
6. Napoleon
7. Superwords
8. WTF?
9. China
10. Protein
Sabina has since added: "I like that you kept it to 10, and I would ask you to unpack some of these, except I find I agree with most of them! E. coli, maybe, you could unpack E. coli for the class. XD"
And I replied:
E. coli is a ubiquitous bacterium that enters our intestines (and those of other warm-blooded creatures) within the first forty hours after birth and creates many friends and relations that hang around there being benign and friendly and even doing helpful stuff like manufacturing vitamin K2, whatever that is (I'd originally read that as "vitamin K12" which I assumed was a vitamin that helped us stay in school until graduation). Apparently these goody-good E. coli also prevent "the establishment of pathogenic bacteria within the intestine."
But these E. coli creatures are only good because of their environment. If they hang out in bad places - that is, are jostled by some biological problem or somehow get out of the intestine and end up in the abdomen or somewhere - they can suddenly become very dangerous. Some E. coli got loose inside my brother several years ago but fortunately the doctors were able to control this so he incurred no lasting damage. Also, there are some bad strains of E. coli that hang around in undercooked meat and unwashed vegetables and suddenly cause an outbreak as happened several years ago due to unpasteurized fruit juices and at other times due to contaminated ground beef and unwashed spinach. Also, sprouts, such as alfalfa sprouts and bean sprouts, can get contaminated by E. coli and may not be easy to decontaminate since one tends not to cook them, though when I looked this up at Wikip I was warned that I was in the vicinity of weasel words, i.e., "vague phrasing that often accompanies biased or unverifiable information." In any event, when I realized that sprouts were potentially contaminated I also realized that I didn't like how they tasted anyway.
As for whether these facts make E. coli more top-ten worthy than syphilis, cancer, the flu, or the common cold, that indeed is debatable. But I would say that its being ubiquitous in warm-blooded creatures, its infecting one's brother, and its giving me an excuse to stop eating sprouts gets it into the pantheon.
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Does the wheel also include the Rolling Stones, since presumably the first wheels were actually rolling stones?
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my mum's favourite wooden stirring spoon was so ropey and decayed-looking that my gran affectionately dubbed it "e coli"