International Journal of Food Microbiology. 2004;91(1):1-11
This article reviews the current state of knowledge about the importance of recontamination as a cause of food-borne disease.
Food products that have been submitted to an adequate heat-treatment during processing are free of vegetative pathogens and, depending on the treatments, of sporeformers and are generally regarded as safe. Some processed products have nevertheless been responsible for food-borne illnesses. Thorough epidemiological investigations of several of these outbreaks have demonstrated that the presence of vegetative pathogens such as Salmonella spp. or Listeria monocytogenes in the consumed products was frequently due to post-process recontamination.
The majority of studies on pathogens in foods are devoted to investigations on their presence in raw materials or on their growth and behaviour in the finished products. Reference to recontamination is, however, only made in relatively few publications and very little is published on the sources and routes of these pathogens into products after the final lethal processing step. The article advocates that an effort should be made to develop our knowledge and information on recontamination further and to start using it systematically in the exposure assessment part of Microbiological Risk Assessment studies.
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