THOUSANDS of lives could be saved by a testing kit being developed by Scottish scientists which detects a host of fatal food-poisoning bugs in as little as five hours.
The device will be capable of dramatically reducing the detection time for food-borne diseases such as E coli, campylobacter, listeria and salmonella from the current six days routinely required.
It has already been successfully tested in the lab
oratories of the Macaulay Institute in Aberdeen. Backers believe the technology could eventually be harnessed to help detect human pathogens, including the killer MRSA bug.
Dr Brajesh Singh, the senior research scientist who is leading the project, said: "The conventional methods for detecting food contamination used by industries and regulatory agencies are labour-intensive, time-consuming and costly.
"Our technology offers for, the first time, at low cost, the simultaneous detection of multiple contaminants within five to eight hours and has the potential to revolutionise the food safety industry and save lives through prevention of food-poisoning epidemics."
Dr Singh said that £246,000 in funding provided by Scottish Enterprise is now to be used to develop a kit which can be sold worldwide by 2010 through a spin-out company.
Microbiologists seeking to identify food bugs currently have to grow cultures in the laboratory before they can be identified. The new system is based on extracting DNA from samples of food, water or soil sent for analysis and then running a DNA sequence to discover which particular type of bacteria is present.
Dr Singh added: "The potential of this method is massive. Early detection could help save lives. Current analysis can sometimes take even weeks, depending on the organism you are looking for. It is five to six days for salmonella and even longer for listeria.
"But this method will allow us to bring back samples to a lab and do the analysis within five to eight hours maximum."
Another advantage of the system is that it can be used to detect a range of organisms at the same time.
Dr Singh added: "We believe that this technology provides a real opportunity to make Scotland a world leader in microbial diagnostics and industrial microbiology. The project will allow Scotland to compete with North America and Europe in this growing market.
Professor Hugh Pennington, Scotland's leading microbiologist, said: "If it's as good as it's cracked up to be, it will be extremely valuable. Particularly with MRSA, the sooner you get a result, the better."
FOOD-BORNE DISEASE RISKS
ABOUT 1.8 million people die each year from diarrhoeal diseases, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).
In the US alone, there are about 76 million cases of food-borne diseases annually, causing 325,000 hospitalisations and 5,000 deaths.
In 1994 an outbreak of salmonella, due to contaminated ice cream, affected an estimated 224,000 people in the US. And in 1988 an outbreak of hepatitis A, traced to contaminated clams, affected some 300,000 individuals in China.
The WHO lists E coli, listeriosis, salmonellosis and campylobacteriosis as among the biggest threats.
