Created: 18 September 2007 | Watched by: 4 people | Comments: 0 comments

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  Reliably detecting foodborne pathogens with nanotechnology and encoding/decoding techniques 

  http://www.nanotechnology.com/news/?id=11488

  Every few months you can read about a recall of food items, be it fresh spinach of bottled infant formula, due to contamination with salmonella, E. coli or some other foodborne pathogen. A pathogen is ... a an organism that causes disease in another organism. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that foodborne diseases cause 76 million illnesses, 325,000 hospitalizations, and 5,000 deaths each year. In 2000, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimated the costs associated with five major bacterial foodborne pathogens to be $6.9 billion. The Food and Drug Administration's (FDA's) 2005 Food Code states that the estimated cost of foodborne illness is $10--$83 billion annually (source). These staggering numbers, not to mention the potential of foodborne pathogens for terrorists attacks, are driving the development of biosensors as important analytical tools for the rapid detection of pathogens in the field, and they are increasingly playing a key role in contr   [More...] [Less...]

  First added: 2 October 2007, by: Jutta Schrimpf  [Report as spam]

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  Tags:  biosensors, nanoscience, nanotechnology