Staphylococcal food poisoning is a common cause of foodborne illness. In Australia, since 2000, approximately 30% of foodborne Staphylococcus aureus outbreaks reported to OzFoodNet have been associated with foods prepared by commercial caterers. We conducted a retrospective cohort analysis of an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness among participants of an elite sporting event during which 22 i...

In 2011, a novel strain of O104:H4 Escherichia coli caused a serious outbreak of foodborne hemolytic uremic syndrome and bloody diarrhea in Germany. Antibiotics were of questionable use and 54 deaths occurred. Candidate therapeutic bacteriophages that efficiently lyse the E. coli O104:H4 outbreak strain could be selected rather easily from a phage bank or isolated from the environment. It is ar...

Foodborne pathogens are naturally occurring contaminants that public policies and private strategies target for control. In the 1990s, both the Food and Drug Administration (FDA; US Department of Health and Human Services) and the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS; Department of Agriculture) required a new system for many regulated food plants. Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points...

Human noroviruses (NoV) are the leading cause of human gastroenteritis in populations of all ages and are linked to most of the foodborne outbreaks worldwide. Hepatitis A virus (HAV) is another important foodborne enteric virus and is considered the most common agent causing acute liver disease worldwide. In the present study, a focused, low-density DNA microarray was developed and validated fo...

Standardized rapid pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE) protocols for the subtyping of Escherichia coli O157:H7, Salmonella serotypes, and Shigella species are described. These protocols are used by laboratories in PulseNet, a network of state and local health departments, and other public health laboratories that perform real-time PFGE subtyping of these bacterial foodborne pathogens for su...

The World Health Organization (WHO) has estimated that 2.2 million deaths occur each year because of diarrheal diseases. Data from WHO show that diarrheal illnesses are a significant cause of mortality in children under five years old in six world regions; however, there are few comparative data on the burden of foodborne diseases, which are primarily diarrheal, among the general population in ...

OBJECTIVE Traditional surveillance systems capture only a fraction of the estimated 48 million yearly cases of foodborne illness in the United States. We assessed whether foodservice reviews on Yelp.com (a business review site) can be used to support foodborne illness surveillance efforts. METHODS We obtained reviews from 2005 to 2012 of 5824 foodservice businesses closest to 29 colleges. Aft...

To the Editor: Fox et al. used computer-assisted telephone interview (CATI) techniques in an outbreak of cryptosporidiosis (1). Australian health agencies have used CATI for several years. A case-control study during an outbreak of Salmonella Mbandaka in 1996 employed CATI to interview 15 casepatients and 45 controls; contaminated peanut butter was implicated (2). Foodborne disease outbreaks ar...

Because secondary transmission masks the connection between sources and outbreaks, estimating the proportion of foodborne norovirus infections is difficult. We studied whether norovirus genotype frequency distributions (genotype profiles) can enhance detection of the sources of foodborne outbreaks. Control measures differ substantially; therefore, differentiating this transmission mode from per...