Advances in Foodborne Illness Testing

Brief Summary
From the farm to the table there are many opportunities for pathogens to enter the food supply.  Once entry is gained there is a possibility that the contaminated product can serve as a vehicle of disease transmission.  Then it is a race against time to find the source and prevent others from becoming ill.  A successful race requires the collaborative effort of epidemiologists and clinical, public health and food laboratorians.  Within the laboratory setting new technologies that do not require traditional culture methods are becoming available and will soon replace current methods. What is now considered the “gold-standard” methodology for cluster identification, Pulsed Field Gel Electrophoresis (PFGE), will need to be replaced with newer molecular methods that are more  compatible with culture-independent diagnostic tests in order to link pathogens to the same source.  These new technologies will be faster and more accurate than those currently employed because they bypass the need to isolate organisms for characterization. However, these new tests have implications for current surveillance programs such as PulseNet, since culture isolation is necessary for PFGE testing. Hence, the challenge will be for epidemiologists and laboratorians to adapt to the changing landscape of foodborne surveillance as  these tests become more widely used in clinical laboratories. Adaptation will include the need for public health laboratorians to confirm non-culture test results and epidemiologists to incorporate these findings to support epidemiological studies and case investigations. The new technologies implemented by both clinical and public health laboratories will have a great impact on surveillance and prevention efforts.  This roundtable session will serve to describe the progress of how new laboratory methodologies are improving the rapid detection of pathogens and the implications of these new tests on the work of epidemiologists and public health laboratorians.