Salmonella investigation stepped up

The Food Safety Authority (FSA) has sent a support team to Galway to help trace the source of the salmonella outbreak at an Army barracks. Fifteen soldiers remain in hospital following the incident. With evidence of increasing outbreaks in Ireland in line with global trends, the support team will be deployed to help trace infection sources as quickly as possible, according to FSA chief executive Dr Patrick Wall. This is the first outbreak the team has investigated.

The barracks incident is the subject of a comprehensive investigation in conjunction with a second outbreak, confirmed yesterday, which occurred at a wedding reception in the mid-west. FSA and health board staff are arranging for detailed "typing" of the microbe responsible in each instance.

Unfortunately, Dr Wall said, the absence of laboratory facilities meant samples had to be sent to Britain, resulting in delays. Salmonella specimens from Limerick will first go to a Galway laboratory for more detailed examination, before being "phage-typed" in Britain. This will determine if the outbreaks are linked. An important aspect of the investigation is to check if the salmonella typhimurium strain found in Galway, which is associated with meat including poultry (as opposed to eggs), is the same as that which caused an outbreak in Dundrum earlier this year. This version was resistant to six antibiotics and made treatment especially difficult.

A national communicable diseases centre is, however, being set up, and Dr Wall hopes this will have a databank on food poisoning microbe types. It will also ensure quicker identification and more effective control of spread.

In relation to recent salmonella enteritidis outbreaks linked to eggs, he confirmed that the US Centres for Disease Control had speculated if it was becoming a pandemic. It was a global problem, which underlined the need for eggs and poultry from salmonella-free sources.

In such circumstances, alerting the public to the risks from undercooked eggs was important, he said. The Economist noted this month that consumers remain ignorant and "although there are many egg warnings on the World Wide Web for computer-literate cooks, there are none on commercial egg cartons; precisely the place where they might do some good".