Dive Brief:
- A new bacterial pathogen screening for air, soil, water, and produce could analyze samples for salmonella contamination in as little as a full day, as developed by researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- "Current methods used in food, water or clinical applications rely on labor- and time-intensive culturing techniques, while activities such as dairy farming, wastewater and runoff treatment necessitates real-time monitoring of pathogens in environment samples," lead researcher Ezra Orlofsky, Ph.D., of BGU’s Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research told Food Safety News. Traditional screening methods currently take about four to five days and require sorting.
- A study published in the journal "Water, Air & Soil Pollution" outlined the technology, which Food Safety News described as "an accurate, inexpensive, high-throughput, and rapid alternative for screening of pathogens from various environmental samples, including tomatoes."
Dive Insight:
This technology is able to detect "relatively low densities of pathogenic organisms in challenging environmental samples," including salmonella and Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a sometimes fatal infection, Food Safety News reported. The technology was tested against these two pathogens because "they are the leading causes of illness, have high survival potential in the environment, and are considered difficult to accurately detect at low concentrations."
"Since this focused and economical screening procedure tells us exactly where to look within a day, we don’t need to monitor hundreds of samples and sub-samples over several days," Orlofsky told Food Safety News.
Having screening technology that can turn around results within 24 hours would be a boon in slowing the growth of the number and costs of food product recalls in the U.S. As the Food Safety Modernization Act takes hold, it's these innovations that could prove critically helpful to manufacturers.