News
Breakthrough in preventing salmonella outbreaks
Researchers have identified mutations that could lay the framework for preventing future salmonella outbreaks.
University of Minnesota College of Veterinary Medicine professor Tim Johnson says the study began a year and-a-half ago following a major outbreak in the U.S. linked to ground turkey.
“We took the idea of looking at DNA sequences or genomics (to) try to understand how and why this happens, because the type of strain was relatively rare prior to the outbreak.”
He tells Brownfield the new strain was more lethal to humans and more persistent in turkeys.
“So what we’re working on now is taking the information we’ve learned from this study and starting to do more proactive surveillance so we can identify risk factors, or changes in genomes that present risk to human health before they start causing disease in humans and killing humans.”
Johnson says the college has partnered with the poultry industry, public health department, and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help identify emerging salmonella strains before they cause a problem.
