Control of Viral Contamination of Food and Environment

Cliver, Dean O.

As was stated earlier, hepatitis E virus may sometimes be transmitted to humans who eat raw porcine liver (Aggarwal and Naik 2008) . This may be a strain-specific property, in that hepatitis E virus is highly prevalent in US swine, but relatively rare among Americans in contact with the infected animals and in consumers. Studies on this question are continuing. Dairy animals infected with tick-borne encephalitis virus transmit the virus to humans via raw milk and products made with raw milk (Grešiková 1994 ). This, too, is not a universal property-not all tick-borne encephalitis viruses are known to be transmissible in this way; the majority of human infections result from tick bites. Milk and meat of infected animals have long been feared sources of rabies virus; for some reason, experiments to determine whether rabies virus can occur in these foods evidently have not been done. The SARS and avian influenza viruses were mentioned earlier.