Research – Special Issue on the Impacts of Climate Change on Food Safety

Highlights

•Foodborne parasites are a complex pathogen group with varying transmission routes.

•Climate change will affect different foodborne parasites in a variety of ways.

•Intermediate hosts and transmission stages may experience significant pressures.

•Distribution shifts may occur according to environmental changes.

•Adaptability and robustness may favour parasites under climate change conditions

.Different foodborne pathogens are affected differently by changes in temperature and relative humidity.

•Pathogenic Escherichia coli had the greatest impact on changes in temperature.

•Staphylococcus aureus were not significantly affected by either temperature or relative humidity

•A method to prepare climate data for use in local food safety scenario analysis is developed.

•With this method coarse gridded data from Global Climate Models are downscaled to local weather station level.

•These downscaled data are used with bacterial growth model to illustrate how they can be used for modelling bacterial growth.

•This method helps food safety researchers to perform their own climate-change scenario analysis.

•Evaluating effect of climate change on growth and mycotoxin production on tomatoes in function of changing temperatures

•For Spain, for RCP 6.0 and 8.5 the diameter of the mould was significantly lower for the far future then current time frame

•For Poland, the diameter of the mould was for the far future>near future>current time frame

•The situation in Poland in the far future will became similar as the situation in Spain in the present time frame

•Effects of environmental conditions and shellfish species are assessed on PSP

•The patterns of PSP occurrence are predicted based on future climate scenarios.

•A censored regression model was used with potentially influential covariates.

•Shellfish poisoning outbreaks will occur during earlier months in the future.

•Three pigmented baby lettuce were sampled during 16 consecutive weeks from February to May.

•Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Multiple Linear Regression models were used.

•Climatic variations affected the bacterial diversity present in the phyllosphere of the leaves.

•Differences in bacterial counts were mainly observed between harvest weeks.

•Bacillus and Pseudomonas, identified by 16S-rRNA, showed a negative correlation.

•Four flooded lettuce fields were sampled 1, 3, 5 and 7 weeks after the flood event.

•Coliform (>6 logs) and E. coli (>·3 logs) levels were found after flooding.

•The initial coliform and E. coli levels drastically declined after 3 weeks.

•The high solar radiation seemed determinant for the bacterial reduction.

•Salmonella was detected by multiplex PCR in water, soil and lettuce after flooding.