Montana State University |
Montana State University |
by Annette Trinity-Stevens
6/97 BOZEMAN -- The salad is pointing guns at a jar of mayonnaise and a bottle of beer in the refrigerator in a Gary Larson Far Side cartoon captioned, "When the potato salad goes bad."
Spoiled potato salad is one thing, but ingesting a really nasty bug, like E. coli 0157:H7, can be deadly.
Known as the hamburger coli, E. coli 0157:H7 first made headlines in 1993 following four deaths and hundreds of illnesses in the Northwest from undercooked hamburgers served at the Jack-in-the-Box fast-food chain.
After that, the U.S. Department of Agriculture began revamping outmoded rules for inspecting the nation's meat and poultry supply. Last summer the agency adopted HACCP, short for Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System. The requirements replace USDA's sensory inspection of raw meats, begun early this century when diseased carcasses were the biggest concern, with scientific testing to pick up invisible hazards, like dangerous microorganisms.
That's great, agree a group of Bozeman microbiologists. It's time federal inspection practices made it into the 20th century. But current testing methods are slow, cumbersome and expensive, they say. What the industry really needs is a "dipstick" test as simple as a home pregnancy kit that can tell producers within a few hours if they've got animals with harmful bacteria in their feces that can contaminate meat during slaughter.
"Hamburger's a big problem and other uncooked products and any vegetable or fruits contaminated with animal waste," said John Jutila, president of Montana ImmunoTech Inc., a Bozeman bio-tech company.
Montana ImmunoTech and scientists at Montana State University-Bozeman say they have the fastest and most sensitive test yet for E. coli 0157. They plan to develop similar tests for two other food-borne pathogens--Salmonella and Campylobacter.
The invention came from research MSU-Bozeman microbiologists Barry Pyle and Gordon McFeters did for NASA, and now the two have teamed up with Montana ImmunoTech to fine-tune the technology.
The group has applied for a patent on the process, which uses antibodies to detect key molecules on the surface of the dangerous bacteria. They did their tests on raw hamburger. Grants from the National Institutes of Health and the MSU Program for the Development of Applied Biotechnology have helped pay for the project.
Right now the scientists are working on a sample kit. Already one company is interested in licensing the test, said Jutila.
Although the test works well on raw meat, Montana ImmunoTech proposes testing live animals before they're slaughtered. That way packers can separate the 1 percent to 2 percent of cattle infected with E. coli 0157 from other animals. Nearly 137 million head of livestock and 7.7 billion birds are slaughtered in U.S. plants each year, according to USDA spokeswoman Jacquie Knight.
Knight said USDA has been inundated with proposals for new tests after adopting the new inspection rules. Slaughterhouses can pick which test they use for E. coli so long as it's approved by the Association of Official Analytical Chemists, she said. USDA itself tests for Salmonella.
MSU's Barry Pyle said it will be about a year before the Montana test is ready to apply for AOAC approval. The scientists are waiting for the patent to be awarded. They also want to receive the next phase of development funding from the National Institutes of Health.
Meanwhile, the scientists will present their work at an upcoming meeting of the American Society of Microbiology. They also are publishing their results in the Journal of Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Montana ImmunoTech knows of four similar diagnostic tests for food pathogens on the market. All require 24 hours for the microbes to grow on a petri dish and an additional one to two hours for analysis, said Jutila. The Bozeman technology cuts out the 24-hour culture time and can produce results in three to six hours.
Scott Coates, managing director of the AOAC branch that certifies test kits, said he's heard of rapid tests for E. coli but that his organization hasn't certified any. The AOAC has approved about 25 tests for E. coli but only one for E. coli 0157. Another is currently being reviewed.
"I think we've managed to come up with a test for the organism and for viability [whether the organism is alive] in the shortest time possible," said Pyle. We got unexpected results for sensitivity."
Montana ImmunoTech estimates a $214 million a year market for such as test in the U.S. food industry. Company officials also see broad applications in human and veterinary medicine and in monitoring water quality. Their goal, said company vice president Bob Warwood, is a vaccine to rid the intestinal tract of farm animals of E. coli 0157 altogether.
MSU's Gordon McFeters said NASA, too, is interested in the invention. The space agency has come close to aborting space shuttle missions owing to bacteria in the astronauts' drinking water. As with the meat industry, testing methods are available but growing the organisms in the lab can take too long.
Microbiologists are going to have to be divorced from making plate counts, and we think this kind of an approach is quite attractive," said McFeters.
See also Scientists Not Sure How "Good" Microbes Go "Bad" and Food-Borne Illness Easy to Prevent at Home
Send questions or comments to us at annettet@montana.edu
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