Epidemiology of Escherichia coli 0157 in cattle/beef - from farm to fork
2008
Nastasijević, I., Institute of Meat Hygiene and Technology, Belgrade (Serbia) | Mitrović, R., Institute of Meat Hygiene and Technology, Belgrade (Serbia) | Bunčić, S., Faculty of Agriculture, Novi Sad (Serbia). Department of Veterinary Medicine
Since the early 1980s, E. coli O157 emerged as one of the most significant pathogens of public health relevance not because of the incidence of the illness, which is much lower than that of other foodborne pathogens e.g. Campylobacter or Salmonella, but because of the severity of the symptoms and the low infectious dose. The main virulence factors (genes) identified for human pathogenic VTEC are: vtx1, vtx2, vtx2c and eae. Understanding the epidemiology of E coli O157 in the beef chain is related to risk assessment aiming to estimate overall prevalence / occurrence of the pathogen at different points along the beef chain. It seems that direct or indirect contamination of carcasses with E. coli O157 originating from cattle hides is one of key events affecting beef safety. This contamination can not be fully controlled only through adjusting the skinning operation itself. Therefore, at-abattoir control strategies should include either post-slaughter but pre-skinning decontamination treatments of dressed carcasses, or preferably both. The longitudinal and integrated approach in epidemiology of E. coli O157 must include implementation of risk mitigation options in multiple points in beef chain in order to achieve synergistic effect. These control options include on-farm controls, transport-livestock market-lairage controls, slaughter-dressing controls, chilling-processing-retail controls and controls at the catering consumer level. Currently, the only reliable and available control measure along the beef chain, by which even the high levels of E. coli O157 populations can be totally eliminated, is sufficient heat treatment.
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