Abstract
Campylobacter jejuni (C. jejuni) is the most common cause of human bacterial gastroenteritis in the world. Food-borne campylobacteriosis is thought to be commonly caused by the handling and consumption of undercooked chicken meat, but the epidemiology of this disease is complex and remains poorly characterized, especially in the Nordic countries. Here, we used state-of-the-art methods in genetic epidemiology combined with patient background and temporal association data to trace domestically acquired human C. jejuni infections (n = 50) to chicken meat, in a midsize Nordic town in Finland during a seasonal peak. Although 59.2% of the human isolates shared a sequence type (ST) with a chicken batch slaughtered prior to the onset of disease, further analysis at the whole-genome level (core genome and whole-genome multilocus sequence typing, cgMLST and wgMLST, respectively) traced a mere nine cases (18.4%) to fresh chicken meat. Human isolates also shared genotypes with isolates collected from chicken batches slaughtered after the onset of the human disease, highlighting the role of alternative transmission pathways from chickens to humans besides the food chain, or a shared third source. The high resolution offered by wgMLST, combined with simple metadata, offers a more accurate way to trace sporadic cases to possible sources and reveal disseminated outbreak clustering in time, confirming the importance of complementing epidemiological investigations with molecular epidemiological data.
Highlights
Chicken meat is a sustainable food option with a small carbon footprint of its production relative to other livestock [1]
To answer if chicken meat is a possible source of human campylobacteriosis cases, C. jejuni isolates from chickens and humans acquired during a seasonal peak were selected and compared
The criteria for the inclusion of chicken isolates resulted in the selection of 39 C. jejuni isolates collected from chicken flocks slaughtered between 24 June 2014 and 30 September 2014 (Figure 1)
Summary
Chicken meat is a sustainable food option with a small carbon footprint of its production relative to other livestock [1]. Broiler chicken is a reservoir for the human pathogen Campylobacter, the most common cause of human bacterial gastroenteritis worldwide with an estimated cost of 2.4 billion euros annually in the European Union (EU) [3]. Health Organization (WHO), the number of campylobacteriosis cases can be efficiently reduced by lowering the number of Campylobacter-positive chicken flocks [3,4,5]. The food industry and public health authorities spend large resources on surveying and reducing Campylobacter spp. colonization in poultry, such as through The Finnish Monitoring Program (FMC) for Campylobacter in broilers [6,7]
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