The burden of diseases caused by food-borne pathogens remains largely unknown. Importantly data indicating trends in food-borne infectious intestinal disease is limited to a few industrialised countries, and even fewer pathogens. It has been predicted that the importance of diarrhoeal disease, mainly due to contaminated food and water, as a cause of death will decline worldwide. Evidence for such a downward trend is limited. This prediction presumes that improvements in the production and retail of microbiologically safe food will be sustained in the developed world and, moreover, will be rolled out to those countries of the developing world increasingly producing food for a global market. In this review evidence is presented to indicate that the microbiological safety of food remains a dynamic situation heavily influenced by multiple factors along the food chain from farm to fork. Sustaining food safety standards will depend on constant vigilance maintained by monitoring and surveillance but, with the rising importance of other food-related issues, such as food security, obesity and climate change, competition for resources in the future to enable this may be fierce. In addition the pathogen populations relevant to food safety are not static. Food is an excellent vehicle by which many pathogens (bacteria, viruses/prions and parasites) can reach an appropriate colonisation site in a new host. Although food production practices change, the well-recognised food-borne pathogens, such as Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli, seem able to evolve to exploit novel opportunities, for example fresh produce, and even generate new public health challenges, for example antimicrobial resistance. In addition, previously unknown food-borne pathogens, many of which are zoonotic, are constantly emerging. Current understanding of the trends in food-borne diseases for bacterial, viral and parasitic pathogens has been reviewed. The bacterial pathogens are exemplified by those well-recognized by policy makers; i.e. Salmonella, Campylobacter, E. coli and Listeria monocytogenes. Antimicrobial resistance in several bacterial food-borne pathogens (Salmonella, Campylobacter, Shigella and Vibrio spp., methicillin resistant Staphylcoccus aureas, E. coli and Enterococci) has been discussed as a separate topic because of its relative importance to policy issues. Awareness and surveillance of viral food-borne pathogens is generally poor but emphasis is placed on Norovirus, Hepatitis A, rotaviruses and newly emerging viruses such as SARS. Many food-borne parasitic pathogens are known (for example Ascaris, Cryptosporidia and Trichinella) but few of these are effectively monitored in foods, livestock and wildlife and their epidemiology through the food-chain is poorly understood. The lessons learned and future challenges in each topic are debated. It is clear that one overall challenge is the generation and maintenance of constructive dialogue and collaboration between public health, veterinary and food safety experts, bringing together multidisc...

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BackgroundTo support the development of early warning and surveillance systems of emerging zoonoses, we present a general method to prioritize pathogens using a quantitative, stochastic multi-criteria model, parameterized for the Netherlands.Methodology/Principal FindingsA risk score was based on seven criteria, reflecting assessments of the epidemiology and impact of these pathogens on society. Criteria were weighed, based on the preferences of a panel of judges with a background in infectious disease control.Conclusions/SignificancePathogens with the highest risk for the Netherlands included pathogens in the livestock reservoir with a high actual human disease burden (e.g. Campylobacter spp., Toxoplasma gondii, Coxiella burnetii) or a low current but higher historic burden (e.g. Mycobacterium bovis), rare zoonotic pathogens in domestic animals with severe disease manifestations in humans (e.g. BSE prion, Capnocytophaga canimorsus) as well as arthropod-borne and wildlife associated pathogens which may pose a severe risk in future (e.g. Japanese encephalitis virus and West-Nile virus). These agents are key targets for development of early warning and surveillance.

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Paratuberculosis is a chronic granulomatous inflammation of the small intestine of cattle and other ruminants, caused by infection with Mycobacterium avium ssp. paratuberculosis (MAP). The disease can be found in ruminant herds worldwide, causing substantial economic losses at farm level due to premature culling and production losses.In previous studies, it has been shown that immune responses to recombinant MAP Hsp70 proteins were predominantly cell mediated. As protective immunity to the intracellular mycobacterial pathogens is thought to be cell-mediated in origin, we have studied the use of a recombinant MAP Hsp70 as a subunit vaccine in cattle experimentally infected with MAP.The results of the current study demonstrate that recombinant MAP Hsp70 can be successfully used as a subunit vaccine against bovine paratuberculosis, significantly reducing shedding of bacteria in feces during the first 2 years following experimental infection.

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The role of beef in human infections with Toxoplasma gondii is not clear. To get a better understanding of the value of seroprevalence as an indication of the role of beef in human infections with T. gondii we studied the seroprevalence of T. gondii in Dutch cattle and analysed the correlation between detection of antibodies and parasitic DNA. An indirect ELISA was developed and used to test a sample of the Dutch cattle population. Since validation of the ELISA was hampered by a lack of sufficient bovine reference sera, the results were analysed in two different ways: using a cut-off value that was based on the course of the OD in 27 calves followed from birth until 16 months of age, and by fitting a mixture of two normal distributions (binormal mixture model) to the log-transformed ODs observed for the different groups of cattle in the study population. Using the cut-off value, the seroprevalence was estimated at 0.5% for white veal, 6.4% for rosé veal and 25.0% for cattle. However, using the frequency distributions the prevalences were higher: 1.9% for white veal, 15.6% for rosé veal and 54.5% for cattle. Next, for 100 cattle the results with two different serological assays (ELISA and Toxo-Screen DA) were compared with detection of parasites by our recently developed sensitive magnetic capture PCR. Toxoplasma gondii DNA was detected in only two seronegative cattle. This discordance demonstrates that seroprevalence cannot be used as an indicator of the number of cattle carrying infectious parasites. Demonstrating parasitic DNA in seronegative cattle and not in seropositive cattle suggests that only recent infections are detectable. Whether beef from these PCR-positive cattle is infectious to humans remains to be studied.