Training and Mobility Funding Programme: Interview with Carina Brehony from the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food Backweston, Co.Kildare
Carina Brehony is a post-doctoral researcher currently working as part of an inter-disciplinary project using a ‘One Health’ approach to investigate the prevalence and types of Verocytotoxigenic E. coli (“VTEC”) circulating in the agri-food chain as well as assessing their human risk potential. She is based in the Dairy Science Laboratory of the Dept. of Agriculture Food and the Marine at Back Weston in Co Kildare.
I was lucky enough to attend the tenth iteration of the triennial VTEC meeting in Florence, Italy from the 6th-8th May 2018. This is the largest meeting for the VTEC community and had about 400 international attendees. The meeting was organised by the VTEC EU Reference Laboratory which is the Istituto Superiore di sanità in Rome. As the meeting had a stated One Health perspective and one of the major topics of the meeting was the ‘VTEC in the agri-food chain’ I felt it was especially relevant to the collaborative project I am working on.
The meeting began with a great presentation by Dr Mohamed Karmali a pioneer in the field who was the first to establish a link between VTEC infection and the most serious outcome haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) as well as developing methods to characterise the organism. He established the first VTEC meeting in the 80s just as this important foodborne disease was first being recognised and understood. He gave an overview of the last few decades of VTEC research and what we have learned in that time.
The meeting topics and almost 250 posters ranged from Epidemiology and Risk Assessment, Ecology, Diagnostics and Typing, Genomics, Pathogenesis and VTEC and the agri-food chain. A common thread through many of these sessions was the use of genomic technology. Prof Norval Strachan (University of Aberdeen) explained how genomic analysis of eight hundred O157 isolates from four continents indicates that the common ancestor of all O157 strains occurred in the Netherlands around 1890 and then spread globally. Prof David Gally (University of Edinburgh), whose group first identified the ecological niche of VTEC as the ruminant recto-anal junction, described how the acquisition of the vtx2a phage 30-50 years ago coincided with the emergence of O157 as an important human pathogen. Both Prof Gally and Dr Chad Laing (Public Health Agency, Canada) detailed the application of machine-learning models to genome data to quickly predict strains more likely to cause human disease. Implications of this could include preventative measures such as selective herd vaccination and improved diagnostics.
There were several talks and posters that related to the agri-food sector. Dr Alex Gill (Health Canada) described an unusual outbreak related to baking flour. After extensive epidemiological investigation it was found that many of the cases had handled or eaten raw dough. Dr Yuichiro Yahata (National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Japan) spoke about the epidemiology of VTEC in Japan, outbreaks related to food sources such as fermented ‘Napa’ cabbage and raw minced ‘yukhoe’ beef and regulatory actions put in place as a result. Several interesting posters were directly related to my current project and included detection of VTEC in raw milk and milk filters in several countries including Sweden, Switzerland and Italy. One of the most entertaining and insightful talks of the conference came from Bill Marler a US lawyer who has advocated for and represented thousands of people in claims against food companies, including some of the largest in the US, for 25 years. He told us about the devastating effects of illness on some of his clients and how the fallout from some of the biggest cases has led to policy change such as the 2010 FDA Food Safety Modernization Act.
I would like to thank the safefood Knowledge Network for giving me with the opportunity to attend the meeting. It was a very valuable experience and provided me a greater understanding of this important foodborne pathogen.
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