Funding hope for fight against chicken salmonella

Hopes that a treatment could prevent chickens from contracting salmonella have been raised by the allocation of an £800,000 funding package.

A bacteriophage product, which is intended to destroy the bacteria without damaging human, animal or plant cells, has already been trialled.

But the new funding from the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council will allow scientists at the Surrey and Nottingham vet schools to test the product against emerging and multi-drug-resistant salmonella types.

Roberto La Ragione, a professor of veterinary microbiology and pathology at Surrey, said: “Salmonella remains an important global foodborne pathogen that is associated with diarrheal disease in humans.

“This novel bacteriophage product offers an incredible opportunity to control this important bacterial pathogen and prevent it entering the human food chain.

“The proposed studies will enable us to study the effectiveness of the product against different isolates of Salmonella using an vitro chicken gut model.”

Collaboration

The importance of the project, in which the Surrey and Nottingham teams are working with the University of Leicester and Carus Animal Health, was highlighted by a recent salmonella outbreak in the UK, in which one person died and hundreds more became ill.

More than 90,000 people across the EU are also estimated to be infected with the bacteria annually, which can cost the farming industry billions of pounds every year.

Martha Clokie, a professor at Leicester’s Becky Mayer Centre for Phage Research, said: “We have shown that our bacteriophages can prevent Salmonella infection in chickens and that we can produce them at scale.

“Now we need to show that the product works reliably against the strains circulating today and gather the evidence needed to bring it closer to use on farms. We want to stop Salmonella before it reaches the food chain.”