Abstract
The production of safe and healthy food products represents one of the main objectives of the food industry. The presence of microorganisms in meat and products containing meat can result in a range of human health problems, as well as economic losses to producers of these products. However, contaminated meat products continue to initiate serious and large-scale outbreaks of disease in consumers. In addition to outbreaks of diseases caused by bacteria and viruses, parasitic organisms, such as Toxoplasma gondii, are responsible for foodborne infections worldwide, and in the case of T. gondii, is considered the 2nd leading cause of death from foodborne illness in the U.S. Transmission of Toxoplasma gondii has historically been linked to the consumption of raw or undercooked meat products, including pork. Specific concerns with respect to pork products are ready-to-eat (RTE) pork meals. These are pork or products containing pork that are prepared by curing or drying, and are not intended to be cooked before being consumed.Previous studies have demonstrated that T. gondii is inactivated during dry cured sausage preparation, apparently in the batter during fermentation. In this study, we have analyzed timing of inactivation of T. gondii in freshly prepared pepperoni batter to confirm our previous findings, to determine how quickly inactivation occurs during fermentation, and to confirm what parameters of the sausage preparation are involved in inactivation of the parasite. Results from the current and previous study indicate that rapid inactivation of T. gondii bradyzoites occurs in low salt batter for dry cured sausage within 4 h of initiation of fermentation.
Highlights
Toxoplasmosis is a zoonotic disease that occurs worldwide and is caused by the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii
We evaluated the timing of inactivation of T. gondii bradyzoites in sausage batter during fermentation using the low salt concentration identified in the previous study (1.3% NaCl) during preparation of dry cured pork sausage, presuming that this low salt concentration would provide the best-case scenario for survival of bradyzoites in sausage batter during a dry cure process
Meat from only these 9 pigs were used to prepare the batter. When digests from these pigs were inoculated into mice, T. gondii tissue cysts were observed in brain smears from 9 of 10 mice inoculated with the initial ground meat preparation; in addition, ELISA results from these 9 mice were positive
Summary
Toxoplasmosis is a zoonotic disease that occurs worldwide and is caused by the protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Toxoplasma has three infectious stages: the rapidly dividing tachyzoite, the slow growing bradyzoite (in tissue cysts), and the quies-. J. Fredericks et al / Food and Waterborne Parasitology 12 (2019) e00047 cent sporozoite (in oocysts) (Dubey et al, 1998). T. gondii may be horizontally transmitted, which may involve any of the three life-cycle stages, i.e. ingesting infectious oocysts from the environment, ingesting tissue cysts containing bradyzoites in meat, or ingesting tachyzoites circulating in meat (Tenter et al, 2000; Dubey, 2010). Though oocyst transmission is thought to contribute significantly to human infection (Munoz-Zanzi et al, 2010; Hill et al, 2011; Boyer et al, 2011), the consumption of raw or undercooked contaminated pork meat is a source of infection that has been regarded as a major route of T. gondii transmission to humans (Gamble, 1997; Scallan et al, 2011)
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