The application of Pathogen Combat research results in practice

The overall objective of “Pathogen Combat” is to provide new essential information and methods to the food industry and public authorities on how to reduce the prevalence of new and emerging food borne pathogens. The quality control and monitoring along the food chains is necessary to ensure safe end products; mainly food industry rely on international procedures based on culturing methods to estimate the presence, the viability and enumeration of pathogens throughout the food chain taking into account the large amount of time required to achieve the final results. Since producers, processing industry and consumers increasingly demand higher quality for starting material and food products, there is a rising interest for rapid, sensitive and specific diagnostic methods. In this chapter, some important applications that have been developed within the EU project “PathogenCombat” are described; new faster culture-independent detection methods based on molecular biology have been applied inside SMEs and Industrial partners’ plants involved in the project and new important information about pathogen behaviour has been achieved.