Microbes in our food, an ongoing problem with new solutions

Abstract

Despite an increasing number of techniques that are designed to mitigate microbial contamination of food and the resulting food borne disease outbreaks, the United States and many other countries across the world continue to experience impressive numbers of such outbreaks. Microbial contamination can occur during activities that take place in the pre-harvest environment or in the processing facility post-harvest. Current treatments of food that are aimed at reducing bacterial numbers may be only partially effective because of the development of bacterial resistance, the formation of bacterial biofilms, and inactivation of the treatment compound by the food products themselves. This Special Issue will include basic research approaches that are aimed at enhancing our understanding of how contamination occurs throughout the food processing chain, as well as more immediate and applied approaches to the development and use of novel anti-microbials to combat microbes in food. Novel techniques that aim to evaluate the efficacy of novel anti-microbials are included. Overall, we present a broad spectrum of novel approaches to reduce microbial contamination on food at all stages of production.