The study showed that roughly half of human infections belong to genetic clusters, almost one third of clinical isolates match a chicken source, and most large clusters can be linked to poultry by WGS.
Researchers hope the knowledge and awareness raised will lead to a decrease in the Danish chicken-associated cases of campylobacteriosis in coming years.
Denmark had 5,389 cases in 2019 and 33 percent of conventional chicken meat samples were positive for Campylobacter at slaughter. One third of infections are estimated to be travel-related.
Typing-based surveillance of Campylobacter infections in 2019 enabled detection of large clusters and matched them to retail chicken isolates to react to outbreaks. Surveillance was also able to detect prolonged or reappearing outbreaks to help earlier interventions, according to the study published in the journal Eurosurveillance.
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