Salmonellabacteria in food and environmental samples, the company said.
In the United States alone,Salmonella is implicated in more than one million cases of foodborne illness annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Of these cases, approximately 20,000 result in hospitalization and 378 result in death.
“The issue of food safety is a significant public health concern globally, and food producers and manufacturers are in need of more advanced, comprehensive and science-based approaches to ensuring the safety of their products,” said Jean-Marc Durano, corporate vice president, Industrial Microbiology, bioMérieux. “VIDAS SPT, the latest addition to the VIDAS UP range, provides optimum performance to help simplify agri-food laboratories’ workflow and deliver rapid information to maximize the overall efficiency of food production.”
Utilizing phage protein technology, the new VIDAS SPT assay can detect low levels ofSalmonellacontamination and is one of the most rapid and easy-to-use diagnostic tools available for the screening ofSalmonellain environmental samples, standard and large-size food samples, the company relays.
The technology provides a simple, one-step sample preparation, which reduces laboratory hands-on time and delivers results in as little as 19 hours compared to reference methods, which require up to three days.
“Because phages are extremely host-specific, they can offer unrivaled specificity and sensitivity for the targeted capture, detection and differentiation of bacteria from a given sample,” said Dr. Lawrence Goodridge, associate professor of food microbiology, Colorado State University. “Food pathogen detection methods utilizing bacteriophage technology can provide food producers with the ability to detect bacterial pathogens present in their products with unprecedented speed and reliability. This is critical to reducing the magnitude and severity of foodborne illness caused by the consumption of foods contaminated with dangerous bacteria.”
