{"id":6287,"date":"2017-03-21T12:07:07","date_gmt":"2017-03-21T19:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/impact\/?p=6287"},"modified":"2017-03-21T12:07:07","modified_gmt":"2017-03-21T19:07:07","slug":"microbiologist-discovers-new-weapon-food-poisoning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dev.blogs.oregonstate.edu\/impact\/2017\/03\/microbiologist-discovers-new-weapon-food-poisoning\/","title":{"rendered":"Microbiologist discovers new weapon against food poisoning"},"content":{"rendered":"

Microbiology professor Mahfuzur Sarker<\/a>\u00a0and graduate student Maryam Alnoman discovered that Chitosan, a natural carbohydrate derived from crustacean shells, shows potential as an antidote against a bacterium that annually sickens more than a million people in the United States.<\/p>\n

After salmonella poisoning, the second-most common bacterial foodborne illness in the U.S. is Clostridium perfringens food poisoning.<\/p>\n

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Clostridium perfringens cells<\/p><\/div>\n

Present in soil, decaying vegetation and the intestinal tracts of vertebrates,\u00a0C. perfringens\u00a0typically infects humans when they eat meat that hasn\u2019t been thoroughly cooked or properly stored, allowing the bacteria to multiply.<\/p>\n

Symptons of C. perfringens food poisoning include abdominal pain, stomach cramps, diarrhea and nausea; patients often mistake it for a 24-hour flu.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople aren\u2019t dying, but they\u2019re getting sick,\u201d said \u00a0Sarker, who is also a professor in the College of Veterinary Medicine. \u201cAnd many times people don\u2019t report it, so there are likely way more people getting infected than we know about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sarker and Alnoman were part of an international collaboration that studied the effect of chitosan on C. perfringens. Chitosan is a linear polysaccharide that results from treating the exoskeletons of shrimp and other crustaceans with an alkaline compound.<\/p>\n

The tests involved both laboratory growth medium \u2013 bacteria in solution \u2013 and cooked, contaminated chicken meat left for several hours at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. The study looked at the full life cycle of the C. perfringen bacterium, which produces tough, metabolically dormant spores that are able to survive many food processing approaches.<\/p>\n

Results were recently published in\u00a0Food Microbiology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The researchers found chitosan blocked C. perfringens growth in cooked chicken and also found chitosan inhibits:<\/p>\n