Have you ever experienced severe gastrointestinal distress, such as intense diarrhea or vomiting, potentially after dining out?Welcome to The Drip, where we keep your mind hydrated with some science, music, and a mantra.
I'm your host, Zachary Cartwright, lead food scientist at Aqualab by Atiem. In today's episode, we will be discussing human noroviruses, the leading cause of foodborne illnesses in the United States.
There are a number of properties about these viruses that make them a challenge to study and control.
Today, we will be speaking with Dr. Matthew Moore, an assistant professor in the Department of Food Science at the University of Massachusetts, whose research has a focus on the study, detection, and control of foodborne viruses, among other foodborne pathogens and contaminants.
Dr. Moore recently received the Outstanding Young Scientist Award in honor of Samuel K. Prescott from the Institute of Food Technology.Let's hear what Matt has to say. Hi Matt, thank you so much for being here on The Drip today.
We're happy to have you.What are the most common foodborne viruses and how do they typically spread?
Yeah, that's a great question.So I believe by far in terms of foodborne transmission, human noroviruses are sort of the leader in terms of prevalence.And then I would probably say hepatitis A virus would be number two.
These are sort of the two viruses that our lab works on.There's also quite a number of other ones as well that have been linked to foodborne transmission.
With respect to noroviruses, as well as hepatitis A virus, they can be spread through the fecal whorl route, so people who shed the virus in their stool don't wash their hands properly and then prepare food and then you ingest the food.
With human noroviruses, they also can sort of be transmitted directly from person to person contact, which actually is the majority of transmission.
And it's kind of something people don't think about, but noroviruses can actually also be spread through the air, not necessarily in the manner of like a respiratory virus, like coronavirus or influenza, where you would breathe it in and it actually infects your lungs.
With human noroviruses, you actually you can inhale it and then actually swallow the virus if somebody vomits and there are potentially droplets that are remaining with virus in it in the air.
So that's suspected to be one potential route of transmission as well.Environmental transmission through touching a surface and then eating something is also another sort of means of transmission of noroviruses.
What would sort of separate hepatitis A virus from norovirus is that unlike norovirus, hepatitis A virus can also be bloodborne, so spread through sort of bloodborne contact as well, which human noroviruses aren't really thought to be.
And in your field, what are some of the misconceptions that you see about foodborne viruses?
I think actually, to be honest, at least in terms of like the general population, I think that viruses are actually the leading cause of foodborne illnesses in the United States.
Largely because I think it's usually self-limiting and salmonella, which is the leading bacterial cause of foodborne illness, just because of the way it's transmitted and then the way that outbreaks are identified and how severe the symptoms can get sometimes with salmonella.
You'll see salmonella EHEC in the news, so it's something people identify.
One other thing is when people hear norovirus, when they've actually heard of it before, they immediately go to cruise ships, which it's true, cruise ships do actually become places where human norovirus can cause outbreaks and be really pernicious, but that's actually not the vast majority of norovirus transmission, even in those
confined settings where it's really as huge of a concern as hospital wards or long-term care facilities.So, I guess that's maybe a misconception is it's not just cruise ships.
Normally, that's how a lot of the folks in the public will tend to hear about norovirus, but actually, there's a lot of different ways that it causes outbreaks, and a lot of those largely go undetected.
And in your research, how are you able to distinguish whether this is a viral problem or maybe bacterial foodborne illness?How do you distinguish between those two?
Yeah, it can depend in terms of like if you're talking about a patient who's presenting clinically, it can become a little bit difficult with foodborne illnesses in general.
Like a lot of the symptoms can sort of overlap between some bacterial pathogens and what you can see with norovirus.One thing that noroviruses tend to cause relatively frequently is vomiting.
There are actually intoxications and things like that that are produced by bacteria that can also cause vomiting.But in terms of clinically, it can be quite difficult.
Traditionally, it was because there's a lot of culture-based testing, so you would just find out after taking a sample from the patient's stool, trying to culture. and you wouldn't find anything.
So in terms of the gold standard for detection of foodborne viruses, it would probably be real-time quantitative PCR.It means a real-time reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction.
So basically, what you're doing in short is you're taking a small segment of the viral RNA genome and amplifying it and using that signal to say, hey, if there's viral genome here, then we're detecting the virus.
that's usually the most common method of detecting these viruses, especially if you're looking at a food or an environmental sample.
Because in general, viral contamination of those occurs at lower levels than if somebody's clinically infected, the symptoms are quite severe and you're actually generally producing a lot of virus.
So, your sensitivity doesn't quite matter as much there and you could maybe potentially get away with some other methods that may not be quite as sensitive as real-time RT-qPCR.
And can you talk a little bit about the process of how a foodborne virus actually infects a human host?What are the steps in that process?
Yeah, so it's all about trying to get to the small intestine and to get into that intestinal tract.
So if you think about it, a lot of the challenges that we have in controlling it are also linked to the fact that this really likes to infect the intestine.
you have to go through a lot of potential stresses in terms of somebody's ingesting the food, you know, the virus gets in the food or, you know, you touch a surface and then it gets in your mouth and you eat the virus.
You have to go through sort of salivary enzymes, then you end up going into the stomach and stomach acids, so you have to really be able to tolerate really low pHs.
And then you end up getting into the small intestine, you have to withstand a number of proteolytic enzymes as well as lipases. and other glycases.
But really, with these viruses, they don't have a lipid envelope, so you don't really have to worry as much about lipases, nor are they glycosylated.So really, they have to withstand a lot to get there.
And then once they get to the intestine, there's a binding and uncoating step. I guess maybe I should take a step back and describe what the virus actually is.
So it's basically, you can think about it as this really short 7,500 bases of single-stranded RNA.And it's encapsulated in this sort of soccer ball-shaped, really stable protein shell.And that's what the actual virus is.It's extremely small.
It's only about 38 nanometers in diameter.
And this is in the fact that this doesn't have a lipid sort of envelope, so some viruses will have that potential shell and nucleic acid, and then there's an outer sort of membrane of lipid, which tends to really be the weak point of a lot of envelope viruses when you're inactivating them.
These viruses don't have that, so they're quite stable.And one of the advantages of that is it can withstand some of the really, really harsh stresses that your body will subject to.
So that virus is fine hanging out in food or on a surface, you ingest the food.
It goes through your digestive system, it gets through your stomach acid and into your intestine, and once it finds potential receptors and co-receptors in your intestinal cells, it'll bind and then actually uncoat so that shell will actually deliver that inner
sort of 7,500 base RNA strand into the host cell.And how noroviruses tend to trick people or trick your host cell is they basically try and disguise themselves as mRNA.And so they get into the host cell.
The host cell is tricked into thinking that, hey, this is just another piece of mRNA that I need to translate.And the host ribosome translates it.
And then you're just kind of off to the races because it started to translate some of the viral proteins that it uses to hijack the cell. and replicate itself and produce more virions.
One thing with these, especially with human neuroviruses, is that the receptors, co-receptors and sort of binding factors haven't all been completely resolved as well as that sort of mechanism of uncoating.
And so that's still an active area of research.And there's a lot of really exciting sort of areas of research of things we don't necessarily know with human neuroviruses that a number of breakthroughs have kind of
enabled that makes it a really exciting field in terms of breakthroughs of studying the technology to study the virus that have happened in the past decade that make it a really exciting sort of virus to study.
And I think that's a good segue to maybe talk a little bit about your research and what you do in your lab.So what are some of the goals or projects that you're currently working on?
Yeah, that's a great question.So we are primarily, like I mentioned, hepatitis A virus, and we will be in the coming years getting into hepatitis A virus for one of the projects.
But more broadly, you can sort of break up what our lab does into sort of four main sort of sub areas.So primarily, we're focused on foodborne viruses and food safety.
The first area is sort of involved in the upstream steps to detecting a virus in a food or environmental sample.
So, as I mentioned, you know, these viruses, when they contaminate, you know, a food or some sort of environmental sample, they tend not to be there in super high numbers.
And unlike with bacteria, you know, where in theory you could have an enrichment step where you take some media, either selective or not, and then grow it in an incubator and the bacteria that you're looking for potentially will grow, making it a little bit easier to detect.
With these viruses, that's maybe not as feasible in terms of culture or as cheap. And so what you're kind of left with is a little bit of a needle in the haystack problem.
People are also interested with this with bacteria, by the way, just as an aside.It's also people are looking more towards culture-free detection methods as well.
So this whole area is basically of this needle in a haystack problem where you have a low number of your target in a very complex large food sample or environmental sample.
So how are you actually going to pull those viruses out of that sample and get to sort of those few microliters that you're going to load into, you know, do a RTQ-PCR, right?
And so we have a number of really exciting projects related to technologies to try and do that portably, efficiently, and rapidly. We actually have two really exciting projects.
One of them is through something called magnetic ionic liquids, which are these really hydrophobic molten salts that are extremely stable at room temperature.You can almost think of it as oil with metal ions chelated to it.
that are actually magnetic in property and have a charge.And so it's because of that charge, you can end up with separating and capturing these viruses.
So we have a number of really promising graduate students who have projects related to this who produce some pretty promising capture, including capture upwards of 99% of viruses in a buffer suspension.We're still doing work with that.
It's really promising because when you get any capture over like 30%, that's really exciting. But most of this work's really been in buffer.
And so we've got still some initial promising results in complex matrices, but really the thing with charge-based capture.So as I mentioned, these viruses behave almost like just proteins in solution.So based on the PI of the viral capsid,
They tend to be negatively charged in a neutral solution, so if you have something positively charged, you can try and pull them out of the solution with charge.
The problem with a method like that that's really nonspecific in that you're not just targeting norovirus, if you have something that's positively charged, it's going to pull a bunch of other negative stuff out of there, is that you might also co-concentrate a bunch of other crap from the food that's going to inhibit
you know, your downstream detection technique.And so that's something we've actually gotten some initially promising results with, even though it is just charge-based, but that we want to continue.
There's another variant of sort of a magnetic liquid that's called a deputectic solvent, and I'm not a good enough of a chemist, so we partner with a chemist at Iowa State who synthesizes them and can go really into the nuances of them, but it's also another sort of adjunct hydrophobic solvent that actually
is also extremely stable, but the way it's synthesized is much more scalable as well as green in terms of involving sort of plant-based extracts and things like that.And those are sort of the magnetic liquids things that we do.
We have a really cool idea that we did actually have an exciting project on and we're looking to continue, which is the concept of using actually non-pathogenic bacteria to try and capture and pull these viruses out of samples in a specific manner
Traditionally, people for specific capture, you do something called immunomagnetic separation, where you take magnetic beads and then you coat them with an antibody that'll bind your target.In this case, it would be norovirus.
But as you can imagine, there might be some challenges in potentially scaling that up, and then there might also be inherent costs. with having antibodies coating a magnetic bead.
So our thought was, could we potentially replace these magnetic beads with bacteria that are presenting peptides that bind the virus on their surface?
Because in theory, you have bacteria that are a micron plus in diameter or size, and you could inducibly express a peptide on its surface and just grow up as much as you need, and then just centrifuge it and store it and use it when you see fit.
And so we're pretty excited about this because this presents a potentially scalable, low-cost option to capture and pull the virus out of solution.
So we have a project where we're trying to engineer E. coli to present peptides that have previously been reported to bind norovirus on the surface of the bacteria to capture and pull it out of whatever your elution, you know, like loot something off of produce or something like that.
So those are sort of the concentration sort of technologies that we have.And I think there's still a lot to do in that space.And there's still a lot of really exciting work going on with other technologies that other groups are doing as well.
And then sort of linked to that, we have a number of projects that we're really excited about in the downstream detection.
So like, let's just say you've already done that concentration step, and you've either extracted the nucleic acid you need, or you've had that volume reduction, you have the caps it sort of in a more concentrated, smaller volume.We have a number of
really exciting partnerships with a number of different labs that have really cool bioengineering of different detection platforms, some of which are microfluidic.
I would say probably one that we have here that's a really fruitful collaboration and has been for a while has been with another lab in the chemistry department here at the University of Massachusetts.And that's
the Min Chen's lab, and she's a researcher who focuses on a subset of specific types of nanopores that we think could have a lot of promise for detecting noroviruses, as well as potentially other really diverse foodborne pathogens.
In particular, the nanopore that we have been working on is something called OPG, outer membrane protein G. It's actually a porin on the surface of E. coli that uses sort of transport saccharides and things like that.
And the Chen lab has been really looking at this, studying it for a number of potential applications, including like she was, you know, targeting potential biomarkers with it.
When most people hear nanopore sequencing, they're thinking about one sort of very specific technology, which is the MinION, which is also really, really cool.
It's a really portable DNA or RNA sequencing technology that you just plug into your laptop.It's the size of a candy bar and you can go away sequencing.
This is a little bit, that's one type of nanopore, but there's a lot of different types of biological nanopores that can be used in different applications, and so the OMPG is different than that, in that you're not actually loading in nucleic acid to sequence it.
You're actually just cloning something onto the surface of this nanopore, and then your target interacts with either the outside or goes into the pore and interacts with the nanopore and disrupts the current across the pore.
So the way this works is you have a membrane and then this pore forms a pore in the membrane and you have an ion an ionic current that goes across the membrane, and when something interacts with that pore, it'll disrupt that ionic current.
And due to the nature of this OMPG protein, it's very dynamic.
It has a bunch of these flexible loops on its surface that you can engineer to create peptides that bind what you want, and those loops are really, really dynamic and flop around a lot, and it creates this very, very noisy electric current signal, and so when it's disrupted, you can kind of create a very
fingerprint sort of signal.And so our thought was, could you potentially use this to fingerprint norovirus or subtype it?
And that's something that we think is really an exciting possibility for public health in identifying outbreaks, because subtyping is sort of the key
especially to very prevalent diverse pathogens of being able to identify outbreaks as well as attribute the direction of sort of transmission of an agent, like what food is involved.
Usually you need to get more than just, hey, we found norovirus in this and we have this group of people have norovirus.Well, you normally need to get a little bit more subtyping to better tease out what's the potential probable
cause of that outbreak as well as is there even a cluster of outbreaks of people that this very similar subtype.So, we're really excited about that.
We've been using a model because it is still a... We figured out a lot of difficulties with the system.We're hoping to move forward to start applying for norovirus, but we were using a model where we were targeting antibodies.
And, we were able to subtype even very closely related antibodies and get a very specific signal for each sort of subclass of antibody that we used monoclonally, as well as we were able to pick out different signatures of antibodies within a polyclonal antibody mixture.
And one of the other important things is that this was able to work in a very complex mixture where we flooded the system with a lot of competitive protein in the form of bovine serum albumin, and it was able to still pick out that signature, as well as mixtures of signatures.
So it's a really, really promising collaboration that we have with Min Chen's lab in chemistry.And we have a number of other potential directions with other nanopores as well that we think would be really cool for agriculture.
One of the other detection technologies we have is a really exciting international partnership.And so I'm pretty proud to have gotten the opportunity from the USDA to get one of their first international partnership grants that was allowed.
I just happened to look out that first year that they opened it up to the international people in a really cool USDA program related to nanotechnology.
And we partnered with this really awesome group of engineers at the time at Newcastle University who were doing sort of the next generation of molecularly imprinted polymer technology.
And they have this technology called molecularly imprinted polymer nanoparticles.And so, molecularly imprinted polymers have been a technology that's been around for a long time.
And essentially the concept is you take a different sort of subset of monomers and then add an agent that fuses them together and you kind of form like a jello mold around your target and it creates a characteristic imprint of your target and then you elute that
mold off of it and the imprint of your target is left in there and that's what the target's going to bind.
And you can, and these are extremely stable in general and you can imprint, you can sort of incorporate them in a number of different sort of sensing, downstream sensing sort of systems.
The problem or the traditional knock on traditional, they call it MIP, M-I-P.The traditional MIP technology was that it wouldn't necessarily perform the best against smaller targets.Obviously, we're interested in viruses, which are quite small.
But one of the exciting things that this group works in Newcastle, or the group that was at Newcastle and they're now at University of Manchester, worked in was taking this MIP technology and creating nanoparticles.
And when you create nanoparticles with it, it actually enables it to perform really well against these smaller targets.
And we're still in the process of a project where we're using these, they call them nanomips, so molecular imprinted nanoparticles that actually interact with human norovirus capsid protein.
And so we've been evaluating a number of things with it and it's really been pretty exciting because we actually discovered that
When you're creating these nanomips, you don't need a very very large full assembled viral capsid to be able to generate them.
You can just create like a small, I think it's 10 amino acid peptide and actually use that as your bait or your target and develop these and still get binding to the entire assembled capsid as well as cross-reactivity across a number of different
genogroups of norovirus, which was really exciting.So, one of the challenges with human norovirus is that they're extremely diverse.And so, they have a lot of different diversity of structures on their capsid.
And so, you can imagine if you're trying to create something that's going to be able to bind, it may only be able to bind one sort of subset of noroviruses.If you're interested in detection, you want to be able to bind everything, right?
in theory to diagnose it.So we actually do see pretty good cross-reactivity with it.And we're still getting into the weeds of understanding how this technology performs against different degrees of relatedness of these viruses.
And so that's really exciting because the whole work with non-enveloped viruses with this nanomip technology and its potential selectivity hasn't been teased out as much, as well as the influence of the size of what your target is when you create them on it.
So, it's a really exciting project.In addition to the concentration and detection, we also have a number of really interesting projects related to control of foodborne illness.
A number of the projects have been really fruitful collaborations with my colleague in our department, Amanda Kinchla.And one example of this is a
interesting sort of research extension project or set of projects that we have that are related to, you know, that are related to the potential misapplication of disinfectants against these viruses.
So, one of the other challenges with human noroviruses is that If they're not applied properly, a lot of disinfectants may not be the most effective against these viruses.
Because if you think about it, a lot of people when they're applying disinfectants may not clean prior to disinfection or may not allow a proper amount of contact time.
And so we have a hypothesis that we're exploring that another lab actually in Japan has already done with some disinfectants and one surrogate.
is that if you have these potentially not completely effective treatments of a pool of a relatively high concentration of virus that's deposited on a surface and some survive, could this potentially serve as a selection pressure?
So, we know these viruses are quite prevalent.We know they're transmitted environmentally, person to person, as well as through foods.
So, if people are just constantly not killing these viruses, you're potentially applying something called a sub-fatal treatment. And you could potentially because it's so prevalent have.
some potential serial transmission of those sub-fatal treatments.
So we're trying to understand, is there potential for these sub-fatal treatments of certain disinfectant formulations to develop in variants of the virus that are actually more resistant or significantly more resistant to those disinfectants that are being applied?
And then we're coupling that with a number of extension outputs of actually observing, what are people doing?What are the ways to get them to better apply disinfectants?And so
We have a number of USDA-funded research extension projects as well as a fellowship.So I have a student, Christina Allingham, who received a fellowship for this.
And we also have a new PhD student, Julia Fukuba, in our lab who's working on it, as well as Brittany Gold, who's a new master's student.
In terms of the concentration work, he's already graduated and at the NIH, but Ann and Srinidhi did a lot of the really cool bacterial concentration work that we are doing, as well as Minji Kim, who's now a postdoc in my lab.
Minji is working on picking up some of the bacterial concentration work.In addition to, she was the core person who really oversaw the nanopore work that I just mentioned with the OPG nanopore.So Minji's a really accomplished
you know, food detection person in terms of engineering nanopores and things like that.And she's currently training both Catherine Wu on the bacterial concentration as well as
Shuang Yu, who will be doing some more nanopore work, and they're both master's students.In terms of the magnetic liquids, Sloane Stouffer is another PhD, but in a few months we'll be moving on, because she'll be defending.
But she also received a USDA NIFA fellowship, in addition to Christina, to continue this work with the magnetic ionic liquids that I mentioned, and she's got really, really promising results.
about using these not only for concentrating the virus from foods, but doing an all-in-one one-stop shop, capture the virus to concentrate it, then actually lyse the capsid and then recapture the RNA so you can do downstream portable amplification of the RNA.
So, she's done a really great job.
And she's actually training Chan-Wan Ju, who will be taking over as a PhD student in the fall to continue this magnetic liquids work, as well as Lily Syatt, who's actually, I mentioned IAFP earlier, the International Association for Food Protection.
I'm actually proud to say that she actually was awarded a student travel scholarship for that to go present some of the really cool work as an undergraduate that she did in our lab with the deputectic solvent magnetic liquids that I mentioned.
So yeah, so we have a lot of really cool students doing a lot of this really cool work.It's not really me.I just get to take credit for it, even though they're doing all the footwork.So yeah, so sorry to get back to the disinfection.
That's just one of the other disinfection projects.
And then the last sort of thing that we're interested in, but quite honestly, we haven't had success as much in terms of funding, is understanding the influence of the gut microbiota on viral infection, on noroviral infection.
as well as potentially creating newer animal models for this infection or for studying this virus.
Though that said, in terms of advancements, coming up with models for human noroviruses or noroviruses in general is a really exciting area, and there have been a number of really, really great breakthroughs.
In terms of understanding the influence of the microbiota on human norovirus infection, it was about a decade ago plus that a number of labs throughout the country established that a number of these enteric viruses can actually be influenced by the bacteria that we have in our gut in terms of their ability to infect it.
And one group was able to demonstrate that human noroviruses also seem to be influenced and potentially assisted by certain bacteria in the gut.
It's still a really evolving area of research and it's something that we're really interested in and have done a lot of reading on.I haven't been as good about applying for grants
to those areas, but it is really something that we're interested in and excited about.
And we have a really, really cool project with Yanhua Park in the Department of Food Science here, whose office is literally the wall you see behind me, who does really, really cool work with non-vertebrate animal model systems.
And so we have a really exciting project with her trying to come up with a really, really good norovirus non-fat vertebrate model.I would say that there already is a really good one with zebrafish that was established already in 2018, I believe.
But we have another one that has a different... It's a different animal that can also give us additional information to supplement what folks have been able to find out with zebrafish.
Well, I'm impressed with the number of projects you have going on and it's amazing how many different technologies or approaches you can take to try to detect the same thing.
And even though your lab is focusing on this subset, there may be lots of other projects and labs trying something else as well.
I wanted to move a little away from the detection and ask you if you think that climate change is also impacting the prevalence and spread of foodborne viruses from your research or what you've seen while you've been studying and working with the industry.
That's actually a really good question.I honestly would have to take some time to think about it.In terms of
transmission of these viruses, at least human noroviruses, I would suspect that there could be an indirect influence of this, certainly with bacteria.And then also one thing that we are interested in, that nanomip thing I mentioned, the project
It's not a virus, but there's stuff called mycotoxins.So these are potential metabolites, secondary metabolites that fungi, when they grow on certain foods, will produce that can potentially cause chronic, in addition to acute, illness.
To people, I think climate change especially, that's one that our lab is really interested in.
So, mycotoxins, I think, in the next decade are going to be something that are going to keep showing up on people's radar, given just the continuing interconnectedness of our globe, as well as changes in the climate that are going to influence potentially mycotoxin contamination being a challenge, as well as just the inherent challenge of detecting a food safety threat that's chronic.
that's not necessarily going to be, oh, you know, somebody got diarrhea, or this cluster of people got diarrhea, went to the hospital, and now we have these samples, right?
If it's something that's chronically potentially causing cancer in somebody's liver, that's a lot harder to identify, especially if it's imported foods that may have mycotoxins. So that's an aside.
So I think climate change in particular, mycotoxins are one that would be affected.And in terms of detection, it's a similar problem of you can't really grow them, right?
You can potentially grow the source fungi, but if the source fungi is dead and there's already a bunch of mycotoxin in your food, that doesn't do a lot of good.
In terms of viruses, I think in particular, the climate could potentially influence humidity, which we know has an effect on viral persistence.
But I think as well, just the fact that it's going to continue, the challenges this is going to stress on the agricultural production system and the need to continue to import foods, as well as potentially enhanced processing of foods by hand or things like that.
you might actually have more transmission of viruses.But that's actually an extremely good question and I really would need more time to think about it to see what type of effect it would have.
But it's certainly going to dramatically affect our food system, likely not for the better, in terms of food safety as well as a whole number of other things.
And just to kind of wrap things up here, what do you see as kind of the main preventative measures that the food industry can use in order to minimize the risk of viral contamination?
I think a lot of it, even though we do a lot of bench work, a lot of it can also be human.I think in particular, paid employee sick leave is big, especially for human noroviruses because humans are at least the only known reservoir of these viruses.
So transmission primarily occurs through humans manipulating
food or handling food, and if they're sick and shedding virus but just trying to, you know, hunker through it because, you know, they don't have any paid sick leave, that becomes a problem, right?
continuing to develop and monitor water and maybe identify better indicators of human norovirus potential fecal contamination.
We have a lot of good indicators for bacterial fecal contamination, but norovirus, there's still an active area of research in that.So public surveillance is a big key.And then just improving employee behavior as well in terms of disinfection.
And then lastly, especially for the work our lab does, being able to detect these very easily, portably, and rapidly
both in foods and the environment as well as maybe having some sort of screening technique for employees as well that might be handling foods to potentially prevent it.
But it's the leading cause of foodborne illness and it has so many properties that make it so prevalent, I'm not really sure.It's gonna be a challenge to get a control of it in the future for sure.
And since I have you here, I wanted to ask you because there's been a lot of media focus recently on avian influenza in foods and I was just wondering what insights you can provide on this specific topic.
Yeah, that's a great question, and it's completely understandable why, especially after what we went through with COVID, that there's a lot of concern as well.
And it certainly is concerning, but I think the risk to public health right now is still low, largely because
The jump to cows and the jump that you see of H5N1 to mammals is concerning, certainly, but I still don't think the cases of humans that we've actually seen of that jump tend to be concerning in terms of the common consumer just going to the store and buying milk or things like that.
So, I think it's like keep an interesting, like keep an eye on it, an interested eye on it.
Luckily, our CDC, FDA, USDA are doing a really, really good job of monitoring and keeping an eye on this because influenza is notorious for being able to evolve rapidly.
And if you have spread occurring among mammals like cows very commonly, there might potentially be a jump down the line.
But right now, there don't seem to be those sort of mutations that would really raise an alarm that humans are going to be at a widespread risk.
Now, I think it might actually prompt, in terms of agricultural workers who might be in contact with cows, it might actually prompt some potential consideration from especially producers of, hey, how are we going to handle these sick cows?
Should we take some extra steps to try and protect those workers who are in constant contact with these cows that might actually be shedding?
the influenza, in particular, if the cows don't look like they're sick but are potentially shedding it, which would be a real concern.
So I think agricultural workers are really going to become a consideration in the future if we continue to keep seeing transmission and widespread outbreaks among cows in the ways that we've seen some of these highly pathogenic influenza spread among birds in the world.
But for humans right now, I think it's really low public health risk, at least H5N1 and a lot of the other highly pathogenic
And I also wanted to congratulate you on winning the Outstanding Young Scientist Award in honor of Samuel K. Prescott from the Institute of Food Technologists.And I was just wondering what this award means to you and what's next.
Thank you very much for that.It's just an incredible honor.It's really humbling.IFT is just an amazing organization.
It's actually the scientific organization that I've been a member of the longest and it means a real lot to win this award from such an awesome organization.
And then you see all the people who've won it and it's just like, I don't know, it's extremely humbling because I'm like, I don't think I belong on this list.It means a lot.I still can't completely believe that I actually won it.
It's just such a great organization. to be a part of and hopefully I can continue to keep having success.
But to be honest, I really think it's more a testament to those students that I just named who are doing all this really awesome work, coming up with great ideas, troubleshooting and going into the lab every day.
I've really, really been lucky to have really awesome students, as well as a postdoc now and visiting scholars who've just really, I mean, I think the reason that I got the award.
Well, congrats again.Next, I wanted to ask you about your music recommendation.What have you brought for us today?I did see your note earlier.All types of music are acceptable.We've had quite a range.What did you bring with you today?
Yeah, it's definitely questionable.I don't know if anybody listening to this would really get a lot of benefit from listening to it, but they're actually reuniting for the 25th anniversary of this album.
I recommend the album Calculating Infinity by the Dillinger Escape Plan. It's, it's very intense and abrasive.I don't know.I have questionable taste in music.So, uh, it's definitely worth a listen.Like it's just, it's really engaging and intense.
Um, but it's, it's maybe not the most catchy approachable stuff if you're not used to listening to heavy stuff.
That's all right.We've had all kinds of music from dubstep to other metalcore and jazz and hip hop.So I just like seeing what people like to listen to.And what mantra or saying did you bring with you?
What is something that you use to bring balance to your life or maybe to motivate yourself?
I would say empathy.I think really trying to understand others' viewpoints, I think in particular.
you know, politically where we are with world events as well as, you know, a lot of the stresses of being, you know, locked down in a pandemic a few years ago.
I think just really trying to understand other folks and what they're going through and just really, really just trying to place yourself in other people's shoes.
I know that's kind of cliche and hokey, but I think it's something that myself as well as everybody else could continue to try and get better at doing.So I would just say that probably as like a mantra.
Great.Thank you.And we really appreciate your time.Thank you for being here.I'm really looking forward to hearing about your research and seeing which award you win next.So thank you again.Thank you so much.Have a great afternoon.
Today's episode is sponsored by Aqualab.In this episode, we discuss viral contamination of food.Little is actually known about the effects of water on viruses' resistance during food processing and storage.
This means that in food engineering, there's a need to further understand the effects of food properties and storage conditions on viruses, including water activity.
The relationship between water and pathogenic virus inactivation is further discussed in an article in this podcast description.
The article discusses how some things like dehydration, low relative humidity conditions, and freezing stabilize viruses, but how there's still a lot of research that needs to be done. Today's song recommendation is Falling Flying by Grizz.
This song is a vibrant and uplifting track that blends elements of funk, soul, and electronic music, creating a feel-good anthem.
The song features Grizz's signature saxophone melodies alongside a dynamic rhythm, giving it a euphoric and energetic vibe. If you're looking for a song to lift your spirits, Falling Flying is perfect for injecting positivity into your day.
Whether you're working out, hanging out with friends, or just need a boost, this track will give you the energy that you need to feel high on life.Give it a listen.The link to this track is in the description.
To round out this episode, I'll be offering another mantra.Feel free to say this to yourself, or maybe just in your head.Whatever works for you.This episode's mantra is, I love and respect myself deeply.All right, here we go, three times.
I love and respect myself deeply.I love and respect myself deeply.I love and respect myself deeply.
As you keep this mantra in mind, I also challenge you to think about 10 things that you love about yourself, and what is that one thing that you love most about yourself?Thank you so much for listening to this episode.
My name is Zachary Cartwright, and this has been another episode of The Drip brought to you by Aqua Lab.Stay hydrated and see you next time.
The Drip by AQUALAB (formerly Water In Food)
