Salmonella Detection - 2014 Food Safety Challenge - Modern Farmer

Huge Advance In Salmonella Detection Receives FDA Award

A new method for detecting salmonella could cut the process from five days down to a few hours.

snowpea&bokchoi, Flickr

Salmonella, a rod-shaped bacteria, is the cause of typhoid fever, but with typhoid eradicated from much of the world, it’s now best known for causing foodborne illness. The CDC notes that it causes over a million illnesses in the United States each year, as well as about 380 deaths. Though it’s often associated with raw chicken, it’s actually present in a wide variety of food items, from chocolate to spinach. One major reason it’s so pervasive is that it remains a chore to detect.

The main methods for detecting salmonella involve taking a sample and creating favorable conditions in a lab environment for salmonella to grow and reproduce. It’s not hard or expensive, really, but it is extremely time-consuming, taking anywhere from 48 hours to a week to confirm results. That’s a huge problem: Waiting for test results can be prohibitively expensive for producers and retailers, and dangerous for consumers. But a new method could help.

Last week, the FDA announced the winners of its 2014 Food Safety Challenge, a contest for new, innovative techniques for testing and solving problems of food safety. The $300,000 prize went to a team from Purdue University, who, according to the FDA’s site, developed a “physical method for concentrating Salmonella to detectable levels using automated microfiltration, which could decrease sample preparation time from 24-48 hours to a range of two to three hours.”

The runner-up prize of $100,000 went to Pronucleotein Inc, a company from San Antonio, for yet another pathogen detection device: this one a handheld scanner that uses DNA strands tagged with magnets to color pathogens, which light up under fluorescence.

You can read more about the winners here.

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