Campylobacter Species, Microbiological Source Tracking and Risk Assessment of Bacterial pathogens

Abstract

Campylobacter spp continues to remain a critical bacterial pathogen of public health interest. They are responsible for approximately 500 million cases of gastroenteritis per year worldwide. Infection occurs through the consumption of contaminated food and water. To effectively monitor the outbreak of campylobacteriosis, microbial risk assessment and source tracking are crucial epidemiological strategies. Various methods have been proposed for microbial source tracking and risk assessment, most of which rely on conventional microbiological techniques such as detecting fecal indicator organisms and other novel microbial source tracking methods, including library-dependent microbial source tracking and library-independent source tracking approaches. However, both the traditional and novel methods have their setbacks. For example, while the conventional techniques are associated with a poor correlation between indicator organism and pathogen presence, on the other hand, it is impractical to interpret qPCR-generated markers to establish the exact human health risks even though it can give information regarding the potential source and relative human risk. Therefore, this article provides up-to-date information on campylobacteriosis and various approaches for source attribution and risk assessment of bacterial pathogens, including the use of next-generation sequencing approaches such as shotgun metagenomics, which effectively answer the questions of what potential pathogens are there and in what quantities.

Keywords

• campylobacter
• campylobacteriosis
• microbial risk assessment
• source attribution
• bacterial pathogens