Campylobacter spp. in chicken-slaughtering operations: A risk assessment of human campylobacteriosis in East China

Consumption of Campylobacter-contaminated poultry meat is the main cause of campylobacteriosis infection, which makes poultry-slaughtering lines a key link in Campylobacter risk assessment. In order to estimate the public health risk of campylobacteriosis in China, we established a poultry-slaughtering model to assess Campylobacter exposure and then applied it in a quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA). Through risk estimation, the average infection rate of campylobacteriosis associated with the consumption of poultry meats was estimated to be approximately 0.00118 (118 cases per 100,000 people) in 2010. Decreasing the proportion of Campylobacter transmitted from poultry to media (e.g., hands, containers, cutting tools) and from the media to cooked food were effective mitigation strategies for lowering Campylobacter risk. In addition, strictly controlling the slaughtering processes of defeathering and gutting led to a decrease of more than 60% of cases of illness. Further, adopting these combined Campylobacter risk control measures led to a decrease of 95% of cases of illness. The overall trend of the prediction data were in agreement with the actual monitoring data in other countries, including New Zealand, the Czech Republic, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Norway, which indicated that our risk model has good practicability and can provide insights into future QMRA research in China on Campylobacter risk assessment in broiler meat.