Key Salmonella Strains Identified in Poultry Outbreaks

Key Salmonella Strains Identified in Poultry Outbreaks
Key Salmonella Strains Identified in Poultry Outbreaks. Credit | stock.adobe

United States: Recent study shows that most of the salmonella outbreaks linked to poultry are caused by only a few strains of the diarrhea which is caused by bacteria, however there are more than 2,600 different types of salmonella, researchers found that only three strains are most likely to cause illness in humans and lead to health hazards.

Interestingly, one of the most common types found in U.S. chicken, Salmonella Kentucky, accounts for less than 1% of human illness cases.

Next to that 69 percent of the illness were actually caused by the salmonella strains and there are some scientific terms like Enteritidis, Infantis or Typhimurium according to the reports published recently in the Journal of Food Protection.

USDA Shifts Focus to High-Risk Contamination Events

These results support a new tack being taken by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) to shift its tracking and detecting to the most dangerous salmonella strains, said researcher Matt Stasiewicz an associate professor or the one who have expertise of food science and human nutrition at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“Over the last 20 years, the poultry industry has done a really good job of lowering the frequency of salmonella in poultry,” Stasiewicz said in a university news release. “However, the number of people who are getting sick from these pathogens hasn’t declined.”

Public Health Goals and Future Approaches

Salmonella bacteria can cause about 1.3 million infections, and this is not a small number 26,500 hospitalizations and almost 420 deaths in the United States every year according to the CDC.

As reported by HealthDay, the healthy people 2030 initiatives calls for the reducing of salmonella infections to fewer than 11.5 per 100,000 cases per year and to reach this goal illnesses must drop by 25 percent by the end of the decade says the USDA.

There are different potential approaches which contains some of the stats to judge the salmonella cases in the poultry processing holding the batchers of the poultry products until they’ve been thoroughly tested or vaccinated the chickens against the worst strains said the researchers.

“These findings support the USDA’s initiative to shift regulation towards high-level, high-risk contamination events rather than frequency of detection,” Stasiewicz said. “I hope this will help consumers understand it’s a good strategy that’s designed to protect public health.”