Abstract
Escherichia coli O157 are zoonotic bacteria for which cattle are an important reservoir. Prevalence estimates for E. coli O157 in British cattle for human consumption are over 10 years old. A new baseline is needed to inform current human health risk. The British E. coli O157 in Cattle Study (BECS) ran between September 2014 and November 2015 on 270 farms across Scotland and England & Wales. This is the first study to be conducted contemporaneously across Great Britain, thus enabling comparison between Scotland and England & Wales. Herd-level prevalence estimates for E. coli O157 did not differ significantly for Scotland (0·236, 95% CI 0·166-0·325) and England & Wales (0·213, 95% CI 0·156-0·283) (P = 0·65). The majority of isolates were verocytotoxin positive. A higher proportion of samples from Scotland were in the super-shedder category, though there was no difference between the surveys in the likelihood of a positive farm having at least one super-shedder sample. E. coli O157 continues to be common in British beef cattle, reaffirming public health policy that contact with cattle and their environments is a potential infection source.
Highlights
Three of the 163 England & Wales farms visited were excluded because transfer delays affected sample viability
E. coli O157 was detected on 26 Scottish farms and 34 farms in England & Wales
The mean herd-level prevalence of E. coli O157 was estimated at 0·236 (0·166–0·325) and 0·213 (0·156–0·283), respectively (Table 1, Fig. 1)
Summary
The British E. coli O157 in Cattle Study (BECS) described in this manuscript is comprised of two surveys: one in Scotland and one in England & Wales. In Scotland, the source population for the survey was the holdings that had participated in both of two earlier Scottish cross-sectional cattle surveys (SEERAD from 1998–2000 [11] and IPRAVE from 2002–2004 [12]) and still kept cattle aged between 1 and 2 years and/or cattle over 2 years without offspring – i.e. they were likely to still be producing cattle for slaughter. The holdings sampled in the SEERAD and IPRAVE surveys were originally selected from a list comprising 3111 farms with cattle, randomly selected from 1997 Scottish Agricultural and Horticultural Census data [12]. The statistical significance level, α, was set at a value of 0·05 throughout
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