A warning to the international poultry industry against complacency in the face of changing salmonella organisms has been issued by a salmonella specialist.
Dr Daniel Windhorst, global key account manager for IDT Biologika, said that the recent multi-state outbreak of salmonella from a Polish packing station underlines the need for continual vigilance about salmonella control.
“The salmonella found in this recent outbreak was Salmonella enteriditis phage type 8, one of the newly-emerging strains. The ‘usual’ culprit in such outbreaks, phage type 4, is decreasing as other serotypes are increasingly involved in human food-borne disease,” he commented. “Salmonella enteritidis is an organism that adapts with time.”
The EFSA/ECDC* European Union summary report on trends and sources of zoonoses, zoonotic agents and food-borne outbreaks published in 2015 showed how effective the on-going EU salmonella control measures had been in bringing down the weight of infection from the previously high levels in the 1980s.
“Poland today has less than 2% of its flocks testing positive for either Salmonella enteritidis or typhimurium according to the report, yet, due to today’s rapid transport of products across Europe, one egg-packing plant can quickly affect people in seven different countries,” he said.