Campylobacter
from contaminated poultry meat is a major source of human gastroenteritis worldwide. To date, attempts to control this zoonotic infection with on-farm biosecurity measures have been inconsistent in outcome. A cornerstone of these efforts has been the detection of chicken infection with microbiological culture, where
Campylobacter
is generally not detectable until birds are at least 21 days old. Using parallel sequence based bacterial 16S profiling analysis and targeted sequencing of the
porA
gene,
Campylobacter
was identified at very low levels in all commercial flocks at less than 8 days old that were tested from the UK, Switzerland, and France. These young chicks exhibited a much greater diversity of
porA
types than older birds testing positive for
Campylobacter
by culture or qPCR. This suggests that, as the bacteria multiply sufficiently to be detected by culture methods, one or two variants, as indicated by
porA
type, dominate the infection. The findings that: (i) most young chicks carry some
Campylobacter
and (ii) not all flocks become
Campylobacter
positive by culture, suggest that efforts to control infection, and therefore avoid contamination of poultry meat, should concentrate on how to limit
Campylobacter
to low levels by the prevention of the overgrowth of single strains.
Importance:
Our results demonstrate the presence of
Campylobacter
DNA amongst faecal samples from a range of commercially reared meat chicks that are less than 8 days of age, consistent across 3 European countries. The recently developed, sensitive detection method indicates that infection occurs on commercial farms much earlier and more widely than previously thought, which opens-up new opportunities to control
Campylobacter
contamination at the start of the food-chain, and reduce the unacceptably high levels of human disease.
Evaluation of the Efficacy of Commercial Disinfectants Against Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense Race 1 and Tropical Race 4 Propagules