Bacteriophage applications for food safety

Abstract

Ingestion of food and water contaminated with pathogenic bacteria may cause serious diseases. Many of those pathogenic bacteria are considered normal microbiota of many animals and poultry and they usually infect human through cross contamination. With the increase resistance of bacteria to most available antibiotics, the development of an alternative and effective method to control bacterial infections is becoming an urgent solution. Bacteriophage therapy is considered an alternative to antibiotics to control bacterial contamination of food especially after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in 2006 to use phages as a safe food additive. It is very important to use virulent phages and to identify the best cocktail that shows the highest efficacy against their target bacterial host before biocontrol applications. In this chapter, we will discuss the successful applications of phages to decontaminate different types of food such as; meat, poultry, eggs, fish, fruits, vegetables, food animals and drinking water during processing stages to control bacterial infections. In addition, we will discuss the developments in phage delivery systems and the application of nano-based bio-packing material and edible anti-microbial coating to enhance the effectiveness of phages as a biocontrol agent.