Molecular Methods for the Detection of Food-borne Pathogens an Overview

It is believed that over 40 different food-borne pathogens are responsible for human illnesses (Buzby and Roberts, 1996) and in the United Kingdom an average of 9.4 million food-borne illness cases are reported annually (Walker et al., 2003). It is estimated, by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that food-borne diseases cause between six and 81 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalisations, and 5,000 deaths in the United States every year (Mead et al., 1999; Lampel et al., 2000; CDC, 2003) and the people mostly affected by the food-borne pathogens are children, the elderly and immunocompromised individuals.