Investigation into the effectiveness of pooled fecal samples for detection of verocytotoxin-producing Escherichia coli O157 in cattle

Verocytotoxin-producing Eseherichia coli O157 (VTEC O157) may cause severe illness in people. Cattle are regarded as an important source of VTEC O157, and in an outbreak investigation, there is a necessity to establish whether or not the putative contact herd shares infection with the human case. The effectiveness of a herd investigation is impacted by the number of samples required, which will influence the time taken to collect samples and then process these in the laboratory. The objective of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of pooled sampling for detecting VTEC O157 in cattle herds in the United Kingdom. On farm 1, 150 individual fecal samples were collected during the course of a VTEC O157 outbreak investigation. One-gram and 10-g subsamples were tested from each individual sample. Once the culture results of the individual sample were known, pools comprising 5 and 10 individual samples were formed, with each pool containing a known number of positive samples. This data showed that the sensitivity of pooled sampling depended upon the proportion of positive samples in the pool. Further samples were collected from 2 more infected farms (2 and 3). Each individual sample was tested in duplicate. Pools of 5 feces were formed on-farm, and half the number of pooled feces were tested as individual feces. There was no significant difference between the number of cultures required for pooled sampling, as was the same for individual sampling, and therefore pooling did not improve the effectiveness of detection of VTEC O157.