Temporal Patterns in the Occurrence of Principal Salmonella Serotypes for Raw Meat and Poultry Products in the United States: 1998-2024.
Microbial foodborne pathogens, such as Salmonella, have the characteristic that only some subgroups of these bacteria are highly pathogenic to humans. For the Salmonella species enterica, there are more than 2,600 serotypes. These serotypes can be host-adapted so that for any animal reservoir, such as a particular food animal species, fewer than 10 serotypes make up more than fifty percent of isolates found in the reservoir. The highly concentrated nature of serotypes within a reservoir is a key to the findings of many studies and the cornerstone of some food safety programs. Nevertheless, a key limitation is that the dominant serotypes for a reservoir are likely to change over time. This is problematic because the risk of illness associated with a reservoir can increase dramatically if a more pathogenic serotype replaces one or more less pathogenic serotypes, and vice versa. In the United States, meat and poultry have been sampled continuously by the United States Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA FSIS) for nearly 30 years. For this study, these data are used to describe how the occurrence of the most common serotypes for each sampled commodity has changed over time. Insight into how often and how rapidly the most common serotypes change is important for designing effective mitigation strategies. To aid the development of such a mitigation strategy, we developed a classification system to categorize serotypes based on the direction and magnitude of change in each serotype over time. This information is combined with a ranking system that describes the relative virulence of each serotype using genomic and epidemiological virulence patterns. We then developed a heuristic system to support risk management decisions regarding the potential risks and benefits of applying serotype-specific interventions.