The USDA is issuing a Salmonella Grand Challenge on World Food Safety Day 2023. This challenge brings together scientists from different specialties to fight this pathogen, which causes more than 1,000,000 foodborne illnesses in American every year. The challenge tries to develop a more effective strategy to reduce human Salmonella illnesses linked to poultry.
The USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) is launching this new initiative to learn more about how and where Salmonella causes the highest risk of contamination in meat and poultry products. This will help researchers develop better monitoring tools to producers can detect Salmonella contamination.
This pathogen is found everywhere, on animals, in food, water, soil, and even the air. ARS is going to integrate its research by combining, standardizing, and coordinating efforts to create harmonized datasets that will help them identify larger trends, emerging threats, and novel mitigation strategies.
There are more than 2,500 serotypes of Salmonella bacteria, and the risks they present are different in all food production systems. The team will use machine learning tools to manage and coordinate this huge amount of data.
And the Salmonella Grand Challenge will help researchers better understand Salmonella risks, develop accurate models to predict contamination and outbreaks, and develop tools to help food producers of many different types of products monitor their operations.
To demonstrate how widespread this pathogen is and how it can contaminate just about any food, in the past few years in the United States, Salmonella outbreaks have been linked to flour, backyard poultry, vegan cashew brie, restaurants, raw cookie dough, seafood and sushi, cantaloupe, oysters, raw sprouts, peanut butter, pet treats, leafy greens, onions, antipasto, ground turkey, and chicken.
