Efficacy of NH3 as a secondary barrier treatment for inactivation of Salmonella Typhimurium and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus in digestate of animal carcasses: Proof-of-concept

Abstract

Managing the disposal of infectious animal carcasses from routine and catastrophic disease outbreaks is a global concern. Recent research suggests that burial in lined and aerated trenches provides the rapid pathogen containment provided by burial, while reducing air and water pollution potential and the length of time that land is taken out of agricultural production. Survival of pathogens in the digestate remains a concern, however. A potential answer is a ‘dual’-barrier approach in which ammonia is used as a secondary barrier treatment to reduce the risk of pathogen contamination when trench liners ultimately leak. Results of this study showed that the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of NH3 is 0.1 M (~1,468 NH3-N mg/L), and 0.5 M NH3 (~7,340 NH3-N mg/L) for ST4232 & MRSA43300, respectively at 24 h and pH = 9±0.1 and inactivation was increased by increasing NH3 concentration and/or treatment time. Results for digestate treated with NH3 were consistent with the MICs, and both pathogens were completely inactivated within 24 h.

Anti-Salmonella Potential of New Lactobacillus Strains with the Application in the Poultry Industry

“…Recent methods for Salmonella treatment, apart from antibiotics, include also application of probiotics (Patterson and Burkholder 2003), bacteriophages (Fiorentin et al 2005;Toro et al 2005;Kim et al 2014), organic acids, plants extracts, and essential oils (Tellez et al 2012). There is also evidence that ammonia at high pH is effective against Salmonella in poultry farming (Koziel et al 2017). Promising results have been observed when treatments with bacteriophages and competitive exclusion products were applied simultaneously (Toro et al 2005;Borie et al 2009).…”

Evaluation of Semi-Continuous Pit Manure Recharge System Performance on Mitigation of Ammonia and Hydrogen Sulfide Emissions from a Swine Finishing Barn

“…Taken together, the manure surface in both control and treatment (represented by shallow depth data) had plenty of total N and NH 4 -N to facilitate emissions. The NH 4 -N is sensitive to temperature and pH and can be easily converted into NH 3 gas [40]. If the available N was identical in the control and treatment, a higher pH would result in higher emissions from treatment.…”

A systematic review on the genetics of male infertility in the era of next-generation sequencing

“…Robust clinical platforms should deal with such variants accordingly, bearing in mind that some may turn up meaning in the future and may therefore be relevant to the subject’s health and should not be discarded. The fact that the field is constantly undergoing discovery, with >200 new genes and thousands of variants being linked to diseases each year in humans and many more in model organisms [18] , [19] , presents a critical challenge of keeping annotation databases up to date. This has resulted in the strategy of sequencing once and interrogating often, based on the premise that a patient’s genome will not change over time and could be reassessed for causal variants periodically as annotations improve.…”