Norovirus remains the most significant virological risk that is transmitted via food and the environment to cause acute gastroenteritis. This study aimed to investigate the hypothesis that the contamination of the commercial food production environment with norovirus will be higher in premises that have recently reported a foodborne norovirus outbreak than those that have not.
Sampling of commercial food production environments was carried out across a 16-month period between January 2015 and April 2016 in the South East and the North West of England by local authority environmental health departments as part of routine surveillance visits to premises. A total of 2,982 samples, 2,038 virological and 944 bacteriological, were collected from 256 premises. Sixteen of these premises, six from South East and ten from North West England, were sampled as part of a public health outbreak investigation.
Overall, 2,038 swabs were submitted for norovirus testing, with an average of eight swabs per premises (range 4 to 23) and a median of seven. Of the premises sampled, 11.7 % (30/256) yielded at least one norovirus positive sample (environmental, and/or food handler hand swab), and 2.5 % of the swabs were positive for norovirus. A peak in the positivity rate was seen in the South East in April 2016. No associations were found between norovirus positivity and bacteriology indicators, or between bacteriology indicators and hygiene ratings.
This study demonstrates that food premises and food handlers remain a potential source of norovirus transmission and outbreaks.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 20 January 2023.
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#18,578,261
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Outputs of similar age from Journal of Applied Microbiology
#57
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