Broiler chicken carcasses and their associated abattoirs as a source of enterotoxigenic &lt;em&gt;Clostridium perfringens&lt;/em&gt;: Prevalence and critical steps for contamination

Marie-Lou Gaucher,Sylvain Quessy,Philippe Fravalo,Marie Archambault,Ann Letellier,Julie Arsenault,Alexandre Thibodeau,Sylvain Fournaise

doi:10.3934/microbiol.2018.3.439

Broiler chicken carcasses and their associated abattoirs as a source of enterotoxigenic <em>Clostridium perfringens</em>: Prevalence and critical steps for contamination

Marie-Lou Gaucher, Sylvain Quessy + Show 6 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3934/microbiol.2018.3.439

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Journal: AIMS Microbiology	Publication Date: Jan 1, 2018
Citations: 4	License type: cc-by

Affiliation: Université de Montréal

Abstract

Clostridium perfringens ranks among the three most frequent bacterial pathogens causing human foodborne diseases in Canada, and poultry meat products are identified as a source of infection for humans. The objective of the current study was to estimate the proportion of broiler chicken flocks, carcasses and various environmental samples from critical locations of the slaughter plant positive for the presence of C. perfringens enterotoxin encoding gene (cpe). From the 16 visits conducted, 25% of the 79 flocks sampled, 10% of the 379 carcasses sampled and 5% of the 217 environmental samples collected were found positive for cpe. The proportion of cpe-positive carcasses was statistically different between surveyed plants, with 17.0% for one abattoir and 2.2% for the other. For the most contaminated plant, cpe-positive carcasses were identified at each step of the processing line, with prevalence varying between 10.0% and 25.0%, whereas this prevalence varied between 0% and 25.0% for the environmental surfaces sampled. Based on the results obtained, enterotoxigenic C. perfringens strains could potentially represent a risk for the consumer.

Highlights

It is estimated that approximately 4 million Canadians suffer from food poisoning each year, and Clostridium perfringens has been identified as one of the bacterial pathogens causing the greatest number of these illnesses [1]
For the carcass sampling conducted in abattoir B, bleeding (B), before evisceration (BE) and before chilling (BC) critical steps of the slaughter process were uniformly sampled during the study, with a total of 39 samples each, while 38 and 24 samples were recovered from the water immersion (W) and dry-air (A) chilling critical steps, respectively
Studies conducted on C. perfringens prevalence in raw poultry meat products at retail in the United States, in Japan, in India and in Canada revealed that between 6% and 97% of the analyzed meat samples were positive for the presence of C. perfringens

Summary

Introduction

It is estimated that approximately 4 million Canadians suffer from food poisoning each year, and Clostridium perfringens has been identified as one of the bacterial pathogens causing the greatest number of these illnesses [1]. C. perfringens is widely distributed in soils, wastewaters, foods, in addition to being part of the normal intestinal microflora of animals and humans [19] Strains of this bacterial species are categorized into five types, from A to E, based on the carriage of different combinations of the four toxin-encoding genes named cpa, cpb, etx and iA [20]. Following ingestion of C. perfringens vegetative cells, sporulation-initiating factors present in the human intestinal environment will induce the simultaneous sporulation and CPE production by the bacterium. Upon lysis, these cells will release large amounts of CPE molecules into the intestinal lumen and the typical symptoms of a gastro-intestinal illness will appear following the binding of these CPE molecules to specific intestinal epithelial receptors [16,20,21]

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