Abstract
Salmonella is a globally widespread food-borne pathogen having major impact on public health. All motile serovars of Salmonella enterica of poultry origin are zoonotic, and contaminated meat and raw eggs are an important source to human infections. Information on the prevalence of Salmonella at farm/holding level, and the zoonotic serovars circulating in layer poultry in the South and South-East Asian countries including Bangladesh, where small-scale commercial farms are predominant, is limited. To investigate the prevalence of Salmonella at layer farm level, and to identify the prevalent serovars we conducted a cross-sectional survey by randomly selecting 500 commercial layer poultry farms in Bangladesh. Faecal samples from the selected farms were collected following standard procedure, and examined for the presence of Salmonella using conventional bacteriological procedures. Thirty isolates were randomly selected, from the ninety obtained from the survey, for serotyping and characterized further by plasmid profiling and pulsed-field gel electrophoresis (PFGE). Results of the survey showed that the prevalence of motile Salmonella at layer farm level was 18% (95% confidence interval 15–21%), and Salmonella Kentucky was identified to be the only serovar circulating in the study population. Plasmid analysis of the S. Kentucky and non-serotyped isolates revealed two distinct profiles with a variation of two different sizes (2.7 and 4.8 kb). PFGE of the 30 S. Kentucky and 30 non-serotyped isolates showed that all of them were clonally related because only one genotype and three subtypes were determined based on the variation in two or three bands. This is also the first report on the presence of any specific serovar of Salmonella enterica in poultry in Bangladesh.
Highlights
Salmonella is a major food-borne pathogen worldwide and contaminated poultry products, especially undercooked meat and raw eggs are important sources of it [1,2]
Monitoring for Salmonella in poultry is either of very primitive type or the need is completely ignored in developing countries because of resource constraints, and information on its prevalence is poorly documented, so is the consequence to the public health
Salmonella enterica consists of six subspecies under which there are .2500 serovars [11] that can produce diseases in mammals including animals and humans, and a good number of them can be harboured by poultry without showing any clinical signs [12,13,14]
Summary
Salmonella is a major food-borne pathogen worldwide and contaminated poultry products, especially undercooked meat and raw eggs are important sources of it [1,2]. Monitoring for Salmonella in poultry is either of very primitive type or the need is completely ignored in developing countries because of resource constraints, and information on its prevalence is poorly documented, so is the consequence to the public health. Mitigation of the source(s) at the geographical origin should be the option to restrain a wider dissemination of the zoonotic serovars for which local knowledge on their prevalence is important. Salmonella enterica consists of six subspecies (ssp.) under which there are .2500 serovars [11] that can produce diseases in mammals including animals and humans, and a good number of them can be harboured by poultry without showing any clinical signs [12,13,14]. Heidelberg and S. enterica ssp. enterica 4, [5], 12: i:- [16], persistency and prevalence of different serovars vary from place to place [12]
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