Marler Clark developed expertise in foodborne pathogens other than E. coli, we began to post information that we learned during litigation and by working with some of the best experts in the world. The culmination of those efforts is our “bug” websites, which we offer in the link above, peruse and share with those you care about.
The growth and hemolysin production of two V. alginolyticus strains (HY9901 and ATCC17749T) at 30 °C in briny tilapia, shrimp, scallop, oyster, pork, chicken, freshwater fish and egg fried rice were investigated. Bacterial counts were enumerated by plate counting. Hemolysin production was evaluated by blood agar and hemolytic titer tests. The two V. alginolyticus strains displayed similar growth and hemolysin production patterns in the foods. Based on the goodness of fit primary model statistics (R 2 , MSE, BF, AF), the modified Gompertz model was a better fit to V. alginolyticus growth in foods than the logistic model. Growth kinetic parameters of V. alginolyticus displayed a higher μ max and shorter λ in briny tilapia > shrimp > freshwater fish > egg fried rice > scallop > oyster > chicken > pork. It was notable that the V. alginolyticus counts were similar at the stationary phase, with no significant growth behavior difference between raw and cooked foods. Significantly higher (p < 0.05) thermostable direct hemolysin (TDH) activity was produced by V. alginolyticus in briny tilapia > freshwater fish > shrimp > chicken > egg fried rice > scallop > oyster > pork. But the hemolytic titer was not consistent with the TDH activity, being significantly higher (p < 0.05) in briny tilapia > egg fried rice > shrimp > freshwater fish > chicken > scallop > oyster > pork. Contrary to current belief, V. alginolyticus displayed a higher hemolysin production in some non-seafoods (freshwater fish, egg fried rice and chicken) than in scallop or oyster. This is the first report of growth and toxicity of V. alginolyticus in different food matrices and confirmation that some non-seafood contaminated with V. alginolyticus can be even more pathogenic. This study will enhance the awareness of non-seafood safety and improve the V. alginolyticus risk assessment accuracy.
Leafy greens contaminated with Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) have continued to cause foodborne illness outbreaks in recent years and present a threat to public health. An important component of foodborne illness outbreak investigations is determining the source of the outbreak vehicle through traceback investigations. The Food and Drug Administration is home to traceback investigation experts that employ a standardized process to initiate, execute, and interpret the results of traceback investigations in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local partners. Traceback investigations of three outbreaks of STEC infections linked to romaine lettuce in 2018 and 2019 were examined to demonstrate challenges, limitations, and opportunities for improvement. The three outbreaks resulted in a total of 474 illnesses, 215 hospitalizations, and five deaths. These illnesses were linked to the consumption of romaine lettuce from three distinct growing regions in Arizona and California. Some of the challenges encountered included the time it took to initiate a traceback, limited product-identifying information throughout the supply chain, lack of interoperability in record keeping systems, and co-mingling of product from multiple suppliers. These challenges led to time delays in the identification of the farm source of the leafy greens and the inability to identify the root cause of contamination. Implementation of technology enabled traceability systems, testing of these systems, and future regulations to incentivize adoption of traceability systems are some of the initiatives that will help address these challenges by improving traceback investigations and ultimately preventing foodborne illnesses and future outbreaks from occurring.
Posted in E.coli O157, E.coli O157:H7, food bourne outbreak, food contamination, food death, Food Hazard, Food Hygiene, Food Illness, Food Inspections, Food Micro Blog, Food Microbiology, Food Microbiology Blog, Food Microbiology Research, Food Pathogen, Food Poisoning, Food Poisoning Death, food recall, Food Safety, Food Safety Alert, Food Testing, Food Toxin, foodborne outbreak, foodbourne outbreak, outbreak, Research, STEC, STEC E.coli
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The foodborne pathogen Listeria monocytogenes can survive over time in food processing environments such as produce facilities. These “resident” Listeria strains increase the likelihood for finished product contamination, recalls, and outbreaks. Advances in sequencing allow for enhanced discrimination between Listeria strains, such as those that may be unique to a specific facility. This results in improved traceback from listeriosis patients to the facility where the implicated food was prepared. However, sequencing advances have also enabled us to better understand how a unique Listeria strain may survive and spread in a facility over time. Thus far, there is little peer-reviewed research on how to prevent, eliminate, or manage a “resident” Listeria strain in a facility, particularly for the produce industry. This project was designed to review published and unpublished data to identify factors that may contribute to a Listeria persisting in a facility and to validate potential interventions suitable for produce facilities using experiments in commercial facilities as well as computer modeling. This project will provide industry with tools to (i) help identify what characteristics of their facilities may allow a Listeria to persist, and (ii) select and justify interventions that are used to prevent, eliminate, or manage Listeria persistence.
Technical Abstract
Persistence of Listeria in produce packing and fresh-cut facilities continues to be a concern that the industry tries to address through development and implementation of “seek and destroy” programs. While industry has considerably improved their ability to detect Listeria persistence (“seek”), identification and implementation of strategies to eliminate or manage persistence (“destroy”) remains a major challenge. There thus is a need for the produce industry to have improved resources to (i) rapidly identify factors (root causes) that may be responsible for or contribute to Listeria persistence, as well as factors that contribute to dispersal of resident strains; and (ii) identify appropriate science-based
interventions that can be used to prevent, eliminate, or manage relevant root causes. In particular, the produce industry has a need for data and procedures to validate Listeria persistence interventions, which will allow produce facilities to justify a given control strategy to regulatory agencies, customers, and third-party auditors. This project was thus designed to (i) assemble a comprehensive list of factors that contribute to the establishment and dispersal of “resident” Listeria in produce packing and fresh-cut facilities and to (ii) use different approaches to validate interventions that target these factors. Validation approaches will include (i) identifying relevant previous scientific literature; (ii) experimental
validation in commercial facilities, and (iii) in silico validation utilizing agent-based models for produce packinghouses and fresh-cut facilities. To achieve these project goals, we propose the following objectives:
Obj. 1: Conduct a systematic review of published and unpublished data and literature to identify modifiable factors that may contribute to resident Listeria in produce packing and fresh-cut facilities and relevant interventions, assess the validity of these findings based on the strength of evidence and prioritize interventions for assessment in Objs. 2 and 3 using expert elicitation.
Obj. 2: Use controlled experiments and observational studies to validate selected interventions identified in Obj. 1 in produce packing and fresh-cut facilities with resident Listeria.
Obj. 3: Validate selected interventions that are challenging to validate experimentally (e.g., extensive facility modifications) using our previously developed agent-based model.
Results from all three objectives will be used to assemble a resource document that includes (i) a comprehensive list of factors that are well supported to contribute to Listeria persistence and dispersal of resident strains, and (ii) interventions for each factor, along with justification and data supporting each intervention. In addition, we will also develop a step-by-step approach for conducting a root cause analysis to identify the most likely factors contributing to a given persistence event and selecting appropriate interventions. These resource documents will be assembled into a toolkit and made available through different mechanisms, including collaborations with produce trade organizations, to facilitate their widespread use. Ultimately, the project outcomes will allow industry to more effectively control Listeria persistence, leading to a lower risk of cross-contamination and recalls.
Foodborne diseases are considered a relevant issue in health around the world due to their incidence, mortality and negative effects on the economic and productive sector. Fish is considered a food of high nutritional quality, being of global production, distribution and commercialization mainly for human consumption. Among the fish worldwide obtained from capture fisheries and mainly aquaculture for human consumption is Tilapia, due to the adaptability of this fish under cultivation conditions in addition to the fact that its meat is of quality and accessible economic value. Fish due to its composition, is highly susceptible to deterioration and contamination by different hazards throughout the food chain, putting the safety of products and public health at risk. Shigellosis is among the diseases that may be contracted from the consumption of food contaminated by bacteria of the genus Shigella spp.; food contamination is mainly related to inadequate or non-hygienic conditions and practices in the production, processing and handling of food. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to provide a general perspective of foodborne diseases, especially shigellosis, causal agents, conditioning factors, related foods such as fish, as well as control and preventive actions in order to protect the food safety and public health.
The FDA has concluded its investigation of an outbreak of Salmonella Miami with a one-word public statement: closed.
A source for the pathogen, which has sickened at least 64 people, remains unknown, according to the Food and Drug Administration. In its weekly outbreak update, the agency ended the investigation with as little fanfare as it began it. The FDA’s initial announcement was a one-line entry on its weekly outbreak update table.
As of yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had not posted any information about the outbreak. The CDC did not respond to a request for comment on April 14, the day of the FDA announcement.
Posted in FDA, food bourne outbreak, food contamination, Food Hazard, Food Hygiene, Food Illness, Food Inspections, Food Micro Blog, Food Microbiology, Food Microbiology Blog, Food Microbiology Research, Food Microbiology Testing, Food Pathogen, food recall, Food Safety, Food Safety Alert, foodborne outbreak, foodbourne outbreak, outbreak, Research, Salmonella
Sainsbury’s has recorded the worst Campylobacter in chicken results for the final three months of 2020 closely followed by Tesco.
Figures come from the top nine retailers in the United Kingdom publishing the latest quarter of testing findings.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) threshold is 7 percent of birds with more than 1,000 colony forming units per gram (CFU/g) of Campylobacter.
Sainsbury’s reported 7 percent of chickens sampled were above 1,000 CFU/g in the fourth quarter of 2020 (4Q), compared to 2 percent in 3Q, slightly more than 4 percent in 2Q and about 3 percent in 1Q 2020.
In a recently published study, investigators from Norwich and Surrey have more than doubled the number of microbial species known to live in the chicken gut. As the health and wealth of humans is tied to the health and productivity of chickens, this lays down a key resource for all future studies on the gut microbiome of this important food animal.
With three times as many chickens as people on our planet, this ubiquitous food animal underpins human nutrition and health across the globe—whether through subsistence farming or intensive production, chickens supply more of our food than any other animal. Chicken meat is surging in popularity as a lower-carbon alternative to meat from other livestock, whilst eggs remain an important and affordable source of nutrition worldwide. However, poultry are also a source of antimicrobial resistance and of pathogens such as Campylobacter, Salmonella and E. coli that threaten human health.
Posted in Campylobacter, E.coli, food contamination, Food Hazard, Food Hygiene, Food Inspections, Food Micro Blog, Food Microbiology, Food Microbiology Blog, Food Microbiology Research, Food Microbiology Testing, Food Pathogen, Food Poisoning, Food Safety, Food Testing, Food Toxin, Research, Salmonella, Salmonella in Chicken
Spore-forming bacteria are a great concern for fruit juice processors as they can resist the thermal pasteurization and the high hydrostatic pressure treatments that fruit juices receive during their processing, thus reducing their microbiological quality and safety. In this context, our objective was to evaluate the efficacy of Ultraviolet-C (UV-C) light at 254 nm on reducing bacterial spores of Alicyclobacillus acidoterrestris, Bacillus coagulans and Bacillus cereus at two stages of orange juice production. To simulate fruit disinfection before processing, the orange peel was artificially inoculated with each of the bacterial spores and submitted to UV-C light (97.8–100.1 W/m2) with treatment times between 3 s and 10 min. The obtained product, the orange juice, was also tested by exposing the artificially inoculated juice to UV-C light (100.9–107.9 W/m2) between 5 and 60 min. A three-minute treatment (18.0 kJ/m2) reduced spore numbers on orange peel around 2 log units, while more than 45 min (278.8 kJ/m2) were needed to achieve the same reduction in orange juice for all evaluated bacterial spores. As raw fruits are the main source of bacterial spores in fruit juices, reducing bacterial spores on fruit peels could help fruit juice processors to enhance the microbiological quality and safety of fruit juices. View Full-Text
In the present work, the effect of processing of dry-cured fermented sausage “salchichón” spiked with the selected Lactobacillus sakei 205 was challenge-tested with low and high levels of L. monocytogenes. The evolution of the natural microbial population throughout the “salchichón” ripening was also evaluated. For this, a total of 150 “salchichón” were elaborated and divided into six equal cases which were inoculated with different levels of L. monocytogenes, and L. sakei 205. Afterwards, sausages were ripened for 90 days according to a typical industrial process. Moisture content (%) and water activity (aw) decreased throughout the ripening up to values around 26% and 0.78, respectively. No differences for moisture content, aw, pH, NaCl and nitrite concentration were observed between the analyzed cases. Lactic acid bacteria counts in the L. sakei 205 inoculated cases were always higher than 6 log CFU g−1 during ripening. Enterobacteriaceae counts were reduced during ripening until non-detectable levels at the end of processing. Reductions in L. monocytogenes counts ranged from 1.6 to 2.2 log CFU g−1; therefore, the processing of “salchichón” itself did not allow the growth of this pathogen. Reduction in L. monocytogenes was significantly higher in the cases inoculated with L. sakei 205. View Full-Text
FoodWorld 