Present knowledge in food safety. A risk-based approach through the food chain

Abstract

Animal feed production is a complex process involving severalsteps during feed milling. In feed manufacturing, there arenumerous opportunities to introduce microorganisms from variousenvironmental and other sources. While most of thesemicroorganisms are likely nonpathogenic, pathogens can also bemembers of feed microbial populations. In addition to fungi,several bacterial pathogens have been identified. They arebelieved to be associated with animal feed and include Listeria,Clostridia, pathogenic Escherichia coli, and Salmonella, as wellas others that are less well characterized. Of the pathogensknown to contaminate animal feeds, Salmonella has probablybeen the most extensively characterized. Much of the focus hasbeen on designing intervention strategies to reduce Salmonellapopulation levels on feeds. In this chapter, a survey of some ofthe pathogens found in feeds will be discussed, along withsources of feed microbial contamination, and finally futuredirections for applying molecular technologies such as microbiomesequencing to characterize feed microbial communities.