Clostridium perfringens causes enteric diseases in animals and humans. In poultry, avian-specific C. perfringens strains cause necrotic enteritis, an economically significant poultry disease that costs the global industry over $2 billion annually in losses and control measures. With removal of antibiotic growth promoters in some countries this disease appears to be on the rise. In experimental ...

Inhibition of Clostridium perfringens germination and outgrowth by salts of organic acids such as sodium lactate, sodium acetate, buffered sodium citrate and buffered sodium citrate supplemented with sodium diacetate was evaluated during continuous chilling of ground turkey. Turkey breast meat was injected with a brine-containing NaCl, potato starch and potassium tetra pyrophosphate to yield fi...

Bovine necrohemorrhagic enteritis is caused by Clostridium perfringens and leads to sudden death. Alpha toxin, together with perfringolysin O, has been identified as the principal toxin involved in the pathogenesis. We assessed the potential of alpha toxin as a vaccine antigen. Using an intestinal loop model in calves, we investigated the protection afforded by antisera raised against native al...

The protease CspB and the cortex-lytic enzyme SleC are essential for peptoglycan cortex hydrolysis during germination of spores of the Clostridium perfringens food poisoning isolate SM101. In this study, Western blot analyses were used to demonstrate that CspB and SleC are present exclusively in the C. perfringens SM101 spore coat layer fraction and absent in the lysate from decoated spores and...

The aim of this study was to determine the presence of genes coding for alpha (cpalpha), beta (cpbeta), epsilon (epsilontx), iota (iotaA), enterotoxin (cpepsilon) and beta2 (cpbeta2) toxins in Clostridium perfringens isolates from broiler chickens and parent broiler breeder hens, using multiplex polymerase chain reaction (PCR) assay. The prevalence of C. perfringens in the intestinal segments a...

A procedure is described for identifying and enumerating Clostridium perfringens in foods by means of a simplified agar plating method, followed by confirmation of black colonies in tubes of motility-nitrate medium and sporulation broth. The test is routinely completed within 48 hr. Under experimental conditions, the procedure has been used to quantitatively recover various levels of C. perfrin...

AIMS To determine the incidence of sporadic and apparently non-food related diarrhoea associated with Clostridium perfringens enterotoxin. METHODS Enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and reversed phase latex agglutination (RPLA) were used to detect C perfringens enterotoxin in faecal specimens from 818 sporadic cases of diarrhoea. RESULTS C perfringens enterotoxin was identified as a ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Clostridium perfringens is more prevalent type of clostridia genus isolated from the intestinal tract of ostrich (Struthio camelus). Necrotic enteritis (NE) is a potentially fatal gastrointestinal (GI) disease of poultry and other avian species, which produces marked destruction of intestinal lining in digestive tract caused by C. perfringens. Pathogenicity and lesions...

A new test for the presumptive identification of Clostridium perfringens, C. bifermentans, C. sordellii, and C. paraperfringens is described. The test is based on the synergistic haemolysis shown by the clostridia and group B streptococci on sheep and human and CaCl2-supplemented human blood agar. C. perfringens gave crescent-shaped synergistic lytic zones (7 to over 10 mm in length), and C. pa...