Prevalence and contamination levels of Listeria monocytogenes in retail foods in Japan

Prevalence of Listeria monocytogenes in delicatessen food products in China

“…A variety of foods including ready-to-eat foods have been found to be contaminated with L. monocytogenes (Fenlon, Wilson, & Donachie, 1996;Harvey & Gilmour, 1993;Jorgensen & Huss, 1998;Pini & Gilbert, 1988;Zhou & Jiao, 2004). Previous studies showed that L. monocytogenes existed in crawfish processing plant and processed crawfish with a certain prevalence level (Thimothe et al, 2002), in retail foods in Japan with prevalence ranging from 5.4% to 25% (Inoue et al, 2000), in pigs and pork with the average occurrence of 9% (Kanuganti, Wesley, Reddy, McKean, & Hurd, 2002), and in postharvest processing of cabbage with the average prevalence of L. monocytogene of 3% (Prazak, Murano, Mercado, & Acuff, 2002). Our previous studies showed that there are two different lineages of L. monocytogenes in Chinese food products with lineage I strains being more virulent than lineage II strains (Zhou, Jiao, & Wiedmann, 2005).…”

Development, and complete evaluation, of a novel Most-Probable-Number (MPN) qPCR method for accurate and express quantification of Listeria monocytogenes in foodstuffs

“…This fact represents a main advantage over previously published procedures which take a minimum of 40 h only in the incubation step, [23,44,45] and may take even longer if the confirmation steps are performed by traditional microbiology or conventional PCR [22,[46][47][48]. Additionally, our method demonstrated suitability for application with two different detection chemistries, SYBR Green intercalating dye, which is a more economic approach, and with a hydrolysis probe, which offers additional specificity.…”

Listeria monocytogenes in mussels (Mytilus galloprovincialis) harvested from North Aegean coastal area

“…Although the reported multiplex PCR method does not differentiate serovar 1/2a from 3a (10), this disadvantage would not decrease the efficiency of the multiplex PCR assay in long-term epidemiological studies of L. monocytogenes (11). Previous studies have reported the presence of serotypes 1/2a and 3b in bivalve shellfish (25)(26)(27), whereas de Simon et al (6) found serovars 1/2c and 4b in bivalve market samples. According to the literature, serotype 1/2a is the most frequently isolated strain from contaminated foods (2,8,9).…”