000845 Faster, Safer Meat Inspection Touted

HealthSCOUT News - High-tech testing could be headed to meat-packing plants -- to detect dangerous bacteria like salmonella.

Researchers at the University of Rhode Island say portable "biosensors," which use fiber optics and lasers, take only one hour to test for bacteria at processing plants.

That, they say, has the potential to revolutionize the federally required inspection of meat, now a cumbersome process that entails sending samples to labs and waiting a day or two for results.

"You can essentially almost put the lab in the plant if we make this a portable system," says A. Garth Rand, lead researcher and professor emeritus of food science at the university. Now, while the plants wait for results, "the food's going someplace else. So if they find something wrong, they [meat processors] have to recall it."

Bringing almost instant inspection to the plants, he says, would lead to much quicker detection of possible contamination.

Rand and his colleagues at the university's Fiber Optic & Biosensor Research Group have been working on the technology for eight years, relying on more than $500,000 in grant money from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The researchers have focused primarily on salmonella, but they say the detection method would likely work for other bacteria, including Escherichia coli. .

Here's how it works: Meat is put in a solution, along with antibodies that bind to pathogen cells like salmonella. The surfaces of magnetic beads are covered with these antibodies. Then the beads are magnetically focused in front of fibers that let a laser detect the pathogens.

The researchers are working with Pierson Scientific Associates in Andover, Mass., to develop portable prototypes. They issued a recent report on the new technology.

Kathryn Boor, a microbiologist at Cornell University's New York State College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, called the concept a dramatic breakthrough.

"The ultimate goal is to be able to do an on-site bacterial test," she says. "It would be hard to imagine something that would be more valuable than that."

Testing now entails waiting up to a week for results, increasing the risk of contaminated food making it to market, she says.

Beyond speeding up the process, she said, it would result in more screening. "If you could do a test on-site and rapidly, you could screen lot more samples."

Salmonella infections can cause nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and even death. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta estimate 800,000 to 2 million cases of salmonella-related food poisoning occur each year in the United States

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