New Sensor To Detect Food-Borne Bacteria On Site

Zothecula (1870348) writes According to the CDC, around 48 million people in the US get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die as a result of foodborne illnesses every year. One of the main culprits is listeriosis (or listeria), which is responsible for approximately 1,600 illnesses and 260 deaths. Now researchers at the University of Southampton are using a device designed to detect the most common cause of listeriosis directly on food preparation surfaces, without the need to send samples away for laboratory testing.

Comments

Good Germs vs Bad Germs.

[jellomizer]

One main issue I can see, is over sterilization of food. There are a lot of bacteria's that we ingest and have in your bodies that is helpful. And a lot of people today are getting health issues from living in an overly sterile environment. We have drugs like pro-biodics which are in essence a healthy persons poop in pill form, to try to get these people more healthy.

There are bad Germs that make us sick. But there are a lot of them that are helpful or at least seem neutral (and could be helpful) that we like to kill off, because they are just germs.

Re:Good Germs vs Bad Germs.

[gstoddart]

No, one of the main problems (especially for things like listeria) is poor cleaning standards for commercial food processing stuff.

Yes, there certainly are good bacteria which promote health ... but in some of these cases with listeria, the company hasn't been properly cleaning the insides of commercial machines.

Similarly, things show up in all sorts of places where they shouldn't because of agricultural practices or food companies ... if your lettuce is getting salmonella or e coli on it, it's not because it started out there, but got cross contaminated either in the field, in transit, or in the processing plants.

On an industrial scale, modern food processing is pretty gross.