Research on plant defense responses against pathogens, specifically E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella Typhimurium, holds insights to preventing foodborne illnesses and improving food safety practices.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) recently highlighted a new rapid tool called GeneSeekR that can confirm if Escherichia coli detected in food samples can cause illness in humans.
A recent study, funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (USDA’s NIFA), has estimated the economic burden of foodborne illnesses linked to flour and flour-based food products in the U.S. from 2001–2021 to be as high as $258 million. Salmonella and Escherichia coli were implicated pathogens.
A new study from George Washington University suggests that Escherichia coli infection from meat products may be responsible for hundreds of thousands of urinary tract infections (UTIs) in the U.S. each year.
Researchers from Livsmedelsverket, known as the Swedish Food Agency in English, have developed a new approach for ranking and classifying strains of Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) based on potential public health burden.
Further underlining the pertinence of mitigating the growing global public health threat posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR), recent research revealed 40 percent of Spanish supermarket meat samples to be contaminated with multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) data on from humans, animals, and food are compiled annually by the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC) and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in a yearly EU Summary Report. Alongside the report, EFSA has also published data visualization tools and resources on AMR on zoonotic pathogens in Europe.
Using whole genome sequencing (WGS), the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were able to link a persistent, drug-resistant strain of Escherichia coli O157:H7 to multiple sources for various foodborne illness outbreaks.
Researchers have introduced a novel, thermal biosensor for real-time detection of Escherichia coli,demonstrating its ability to detect the pathogen in milk without sample preparation. The sensor would be easy to mass produce, and shows potential as a low-cost, rapid tool for onsite microbial indication.
