From wikipedia:
Escherichia coli (commonly E. Coli ) is a bacterium that is commonly found in the lower intestine of warm-blooded animals. Most E. coli strains are harmless, but some, such as serotype O157:H7, can cause serious food poisoning in humans, and are occasionally responsible for costly product recalls . The harmless strains are part of the of the gut , and can benefit their hosts by producing vitamin K or by preventing the establishment of pathogenic bacteria within the intestine.

E. coli normally colonizes an infant's gastrointestinal tract within 40 hours of birth, arriving with food or water or with the individuals handling the child. In the bowel, it adheres to the mucus of the large intestine. It is the primary facultative organism of the human gastrointestinal tract. As long as these bacteria do not acquire genetic elements encoding for virulence factors, they remain benign commensals.

Certain strains of E. coli , such as O157:H7 , O121 and O104:H21 , produce toxins. Food poisoning caused by E. coli are usually associated with eating unwashed vegetables and meat contaminated post-slaughter. Severity of the illness varies considerably; it can be fatal, particularly to young children, the elderly or the immunocompromised, but is more often mild.

Virulent strains of E. coli can cause gastroenteritis, urinary tract infections, and neonatal meningitis. In rarer cases, virulent strains are also responsible for hæmolytic-uremic syndrome (HUS), peritonitis, mastitis, septicemia and Gram-negative pneumonia. Recently it is thought that E. coli and certain other foodborne illnesses can sometimes trigger serious health problems months or years after patients survived that initial bout.

An article by Professor George Haycock on a recently published paper  on infections found in normally sterile places in the body at autopsy and links to SIDS.

http://www.sids.org.uk/goldwater-article.html

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