Control of Viral Contamination of Food and Environment

Cliver, Dean O.

Detection of viruses in environmental samples, including food and water, was first derived from the available clinical diagnostic methods (Cliver 2008) . Cell culture infectivity was a mainstay for a very long time, but it was eventually established that available host cell systems did not support replication of noroviruses and most strains of hepatitis A and E viruses. The advent of reverse transcription-polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) has changed the situation greatly. The RT-PCR is now a first line of diagnostic testing, and is also applied to food and environmental samples (Widdowson and Vinjé 2008) . With added sequencing of amplicons, important epidemiologic associations can be established. The concern about RT-PCR detection, as applied to food and environmental samples but not to clinical specimens, is the general inability to determine whether the detected virus was infectious at the time of sampling. All the same, the ability to detect these viruses by RT-PCR (including real-time RT-PCR, or by microarrays) is of great importance in outbreak investigation and may provide information that is useful in devising preventive measures.