January-April 1997 33 I nsufficiently cooked ground beef was identified as the cause of a 1993 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 illness in the Western United States when four children died and over 700 people became ill. The magnitude and media coverage of this and other recent foodborne illness outbreaks have helped elevate public awareness of foodborne microbial pathogens. The food indust...

Current pathogen detection systems lack the stability, sensitivity, and time-independent functionality required for real-time biosensing in the field. Antibodies exhibit specificity for pathogenic bacteria but lack the sensitivity to detect reduced pathogen levels and the stability needed for detection in harsh environments. We are investigating naturally occurring antimicrobial peptides (AMPs)...

The majority of plant pathogens are fungi and many of these adversely affect food security. This mini-review aims to provide an analysis of the plant pathogenic fungi for which genome sequences are publically available, to assess their general genome characteristics, and to consider how genomics has impacted plant pathology. A list of sequenced fungal species was assembled, the taxonomy of all ...

Food safety has attracted extensive attention around the world, and food-borne diseases have become one of the major threats to health. Staphylococcus aureus is a major food-borne pathogen worldwide and a frequent contaminant of foodstuffs. Staphylococcal enterotoxins (SEs) produced by some S. aureus strains will lead to staphylococcal food poisoning (SFP) outbreaks. The most common symptoms ca...

The custom of displaying Chinese-style barbecued meats at room temperature has been a controversial food safety issue in North America. This article is intended to facilitate development of a risk-based food safety policy for this unique food by providing a brief overview of the recent study findings and Canadian disease surveillance data. Despite the lack of temperature control after cooking, ...

Nanotechnology is being envisioned as a hurriedly developing field, it has potential to revolutionize food systems and improve the conditions of the food quality. The present study reports the synthesis of ZnO nanoparticles using wet chemical method and used as antimicrobial agent against Food borne Pathogens. The antibacterial activity of ZnO nanoparticles was examined against E. coli, and Pse...

Vibrio parahaemolyticus is a food-borne pathogen that naturally inhabits both marine and estuarine environments. Free-living protozoa exist in similar aquatic environments and function to control bacterial numbers by grazing on free-living bacteria. Protozoa also play an important role in the survival and spread of some pathogenic species of bacteria. We investigated the interaction between the...