NARMS Retail Food Surveillance and Outbreak Investigation in Ohio

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Project Summary To help address the needs of the NARMS retail meat surveillance project, as a surveillance site, we will sample packages of retail poultry, beef and pork from a randomly generated list of grocery stores in the surrounding area. Aliquots from each of eighty monthly packages will be cultured for pathogens, Salmonella and Campylobacter, along with two indicator bacteria, E. coli and Enterococcus, to address potential resistance mechanisms which may be transferred to pathogens. The resulting isolates will be shipped monthly to FDA for species and serotype confirmation and antimicrobial susceptibility testing, with duplicate isolates maintained in our culture collection. We expect to have successfully sampled 960 packages of retail beef, pork, and poultry during each 12-month study period. We expect that these efforts will help to provide critical data to not only track the current state of antimicrobial resistance among foodborne pathogens and indicator bacteria found in retail meat, but also to impact future FDA policy and regulations and monitor the success of actions and interventions. In addition to our contributions to the retail food surveillance program, as a NARMS retail food participating laboratory we will be available to support foodborne disease outbreak investigation. We already have a close working relationship with the Ohio Department of Health laboratory and the Ohio Department of Agriculture’s Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory. We will be available to directly support and extend their existing capability for outbreak investigation and sample process and testing. We also collaborate closely with the OSU Veterinary Medical Center Clinical Diagnostic Laboratory, which participates in the Vet-LIRN laboratory system, as does the ODA ADDL. Our existing close collaborations with these laboratories located in central Ohio will allow us to be effective as a NARMS retail food surveillance project laboratory, and to contribute to the support of other laboratories with related missions. An additional benefit of our participation in the NARMS retail food surveillance program is that we plan to engage multiple students from both the professional veterinary medicine and veterinary public health programs in this project. Students with an interest in food safety and antimicrobial resistance and stewardship will be able to gain laboratory experience and an understanding of the current antimicrobial resistance trends in foodborne pathogens. These students will then leave the university for careers in veterinary medicine and veterinary public health better trained in epidemiology, surveillance strategies, food safety and food microbiology, and public health practice.