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<ol> <li>Develop technology for rapid identification and enumeration of human pathogens in animal food products.
<li>Determine most effective intervention points in animal food product chain.
<li>Assess costs and benefits of intervention activities.
<li>Develop technology to reduce hazards and improve quality of animal products.
<li>Maintain an aggressive technology transfer program.
<li>Test, modify and improve microbiological testing systems in poultry production system.
<li>Monitor production management and processing system to identify critical control points.
<li>Evaluate physical and chemical systems to reduce microbiological population including quaternary ammonium compounds, ozone, electricity and irradiation.
<li>Strengthen the existing public awareness program with consumer panels and questionnaires.
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The Consortium is dedicated to the development of advanced food safety research techniques and to coordination of research programs to share information and eliminate duplication of efforts. It aims to produce research that will assist in the enhancement of consumer, industry and government confidence and satisfaction in the safety of food products from animals.
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PROGRESS: 2004/01 TO 2004/12<br>
It was found that turkeys with chronic infections with L. monocytogenes had biofilms of this pathogen growing in the knee joint area and which were not readily detectable by conventional sampling methods. These results thus give new insights in risk assessment evaluations of which processing steps should receive more emphasis in the future. It was found that the more highly virulent poultry isolates of C. jejuni invaded hybridoma cells within 2.5 hours. In similar work with human isolates, the usefulness of PFGE fingerprint patterns produced by various human isolates of C. jejuni to distinguish the relative pathogenicity/virulence behaviors of these isolates was evaluated. It was found that the ability of a given C. jejuni strain to attach and penetrate the INT-407 cells or to cause cytotoxigenic effects on another cell line, HeLa, was correlated with the presence in that isolate of a separate circular piece of DNA, termed a 50-kilobase size plasmid. the use of bacteriophages was investigated as a treatment for the live bird lower GI tract to reduce and control Salmonella infections. In young chick challenged by oral dosing, one CE mixture reduced Campylobacter by almost 5 logs (equal to a 100,000-fold reduction) while another CE preparation containing some lactic bacteria gave somewhat variable results, reducing numbers up to 5 logs. Three DNA-based projects were continued. How related various Salmonella strains were to one another when isolated from different sources was determined by pulsed field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) and a numerical procedure termed variable number tandem repeats, VNTR and based on polymerase chain reaction (PCR) methods. Continued progress was made on two biosensor projects aimed at detection of Salmonella and EHEC. An antibody-impedance based sensor was able to detect initial cell numbers of 500,000 or 5 cells in 2.2 or 9.3 hours, respectively. For a second biosensor, based on a self-assembled monolayer-piezoelectric/antibody sensor, a dip-and-dry sampling method worked best compared to immersion or flow through sampling and yielded a minimum detection limit of 1,000 cells/ml for the latter pathogen. If the federal government decides to allow a non-zero tolerance for L. monocytogenes in foods, there will be need for a quantitative method, not just the current presence/absence method. Toward that end, two new promising monoclonal antibodies (MAb) with detection ability for L. monocytogenes were developed and evaluated. Progress was reported on development of a model for persistence of Salmonella and Campylobacter jejuni in poultry production by using Monte Carlo simulations and building "nodes" for key areas including the hatchery, growout, processing and distribution areas. Further progress was reported on usefulness of immunoblots to concurrently monitor three major bacterial pathogens on processed raw poultry. This method showed that the counts of Salmonella and Listeria per carcass were consistently low at less than 1,000 CFU for both pre- and post-chill stages.
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IMPACT: 2004/01 TO 2004/12<br>
The Food Safety Consortium emphasizes research that focuses on these general areas of food safety: risk assessment, education, consumers, control/intervention strategies, sampling protocols and methodology. The FSC accomplishes this research through the distribution of its grant to several separate projects by different principal investigators whose work is coordinated to encourage collaboration.