Progress in detection of Campylobacter in the food production chain

World Health Organisation considers Campylobacter to be one of the four main causes of diarrhoeal diseases globally and the most common cause of human gastroenteritis. Food is thought to be the main transmission road, mainly poultry meat. Campylobacter spreads rapidly in broiler houses even though the infected animals are often free of any symptoms. To further increase food security, it is important to have access to rapid and sensitive methods for detection of Campylobacter. Recently several studies have posed the idea of using air sampling for detection in the broiler houses instead of boot socks or faeces samples as is the current standard. Many studies have presented methods for molecular detection of Campylobacter instead of culturing. These methods can detect bacteria in the viable but not culturable state, which can often be the case with Campylobacter. The methods inability to differentiate between alive and dead cells is one of the most severe limitations to most of these methods.