New Salmonella Serovar Wiki Offers Insights for Food Safety, Public Health Professionals
The Cornell College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (CALS) Food Safety Laboratory has developed the Salmonella Serovar Wiki—a web resource for global food safety professionals to rapidly access information about a given Salmonella serovar.
The Salmonella Serovar Wiki provides relevant information on different Salmonella serovars, including information on:
- Likely sources where a given serovar is commonly found
- The geographic distribution of a given serovar
- Previous outbreaks linked to a given serovar
- The association of a given serovar with human illnesses
- Genomic features of a given serovar.
The wiki contains information on more than 100 Salmonella serovars, consolidating data from sources like the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the European Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF).
Currently, the primary responsibility for the maintenance and curation of the Salmonella Serovar Wiki lies with members of the Cornell Food Safety Laboratory; however, interested experts are invited to contribute to the wiki. The goal is to update the Salmonella Serovar Wiki with additional serotypes, as well as new information such as warnings from the International Society for Infectious Diseases’ Program for Monitoring Emerging Diseases (ProMED), RASFF, and media outlets. New outbreaks, recalls, or border rejections may be added to the wiki if they meet one of the following criteria:
- They involve substantial public health concerns (e.g., a human outbreak with more than 100 cases)
- They are associated with new commodities not yet documented in the wiki
- They provide final updates on previous, ongoing investigations.
By facilitating rapid access to serovar-specific information, the Salmonella Serovar Wiki can aid both epidemiologists and environmental health professionals in hypothesis generation, outbreak investigations, and research into understudied serovars, ultimately enhancing food safety and public health outcomes.
A description of the wiki’s development and outcomes has been published in Food Microbiology.
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