Emerging Food borne Infections Around the World

New and unusual foodborne infections continue to arise around the world, as the expanding ecologies of human food production provide niches for the emergence of foodborne pathogens.

Nipah virus (Nipah virus is closely related to Hendra virus Nipah virus (Nipah virus is closely related to Hendra virus. Both are members of the genus Henipavirus, a new class of virus in the Paramyxoviridae family.)encephalitis in Bangladesh, and Shiga toxin–producing E. coli O104 infections in Germany ( Burger, 2011, and Luby et al., 2011 ).

In Brazil, Chagas disease, a parasitic infection caused by Trypanosoma cruzi, transmitted by the feces of the triatomid bug, and carried by the opossum, is a classic vectorborne infection, long associated with primitive rural thatched housing. An urban foodborne outbreak occurred in 1986, linked to consumption of fresh sugar cane juice, apparently contaminated by triatomids or opossum feces present in the cane as it was crushed to extract the juice (Shikanai-Yasuda et al., 1991). Since then, such outbreaks have been more frequently recognized, particularly with production of fresh juice of the açai berry, a jungle fruit that is now being grown in orchards to satisfy consumer demand (Nobrega et al., 2009). The transmission may depend on the intersection of this production with Amazonian ecology (Valente et al., 2009). Such outbreaks may be due to the direct contamination of freshly processed juice with bugs; illness has not been reported from commercial pasteurized product.

In western China, between 2006 and 2009, public health officials investigated several foodborne outbreaks of infection with toxigenic Vibrio cholerae O139, a variant strain of the dominant V. cholerae O1 that first appeared in India in 1995 and spread through Southeast Asia (Li et al., 2008; Tang et al., 2010; Xia et al., 2010). In these outbreaks, the food vehicle has been the soft-shelled turtle, steamed and served at banquet celebrations

In Israel,1996-1997, 62 cases of severe Vibrio vulnificus biotype 3 infections were reported, among persons handling the live fish (Bisharat et al., 1999). These infections were food-associated, although not caused by eating the fish itself. In Taiwan, since 2000, extremely resistant strains of Salmonella serotype Choleraesuis have caused serious infections in humans and have also been detected in local swineherds (Chiu et al., 2002).