Molecular Epidemiology and Surveillance Program in Iran: Present Status and Future Prospect

Background and aims: The food-borne pathogens appear to be a reemerging and endless problem inthe human community all over the world. Hence, all the outbreaks should be constantly monitored forpandemic strains and new mutant genotypes. The main purpose behind the molecular typing methodsis the comparison of bacterial isolates to obtain genomic relatedness regarding epidemiologicalaspects. One of these methods that have been recently reported in several Iranian studies is pulse fieldgel electrophoresis (PFGE). The aim of this study was to review and discuss the current situation anddifficulties, and also the necessity of planning for tracking new and re-emerging food-borne pathogensinvestigating PFGE future status in Iran as a molecular epidemiology tool.Results: According to the results, it was found that this technique requires high investments in bothfields of required equipment and software some of which are now available in many research centers.In addition, investigations on various medical search engines revealed that hundreds of studies havebeen published after 2010 in Iran. These reports indicated that most of these studies were not able toprovide an efficient epidemiological analysis of the outbreaks and prevention of future events, exceptfor a few exceptions.Conclusion: A review of the capabilities available in the country in this respect led the researchers toinfer that it may be the best time to make a plan on the existence of a general network of collectingand analyzing the results, as well as integrating them into the international databases. It is expectedthat these responsible institutions to make the required design in this field.