Key result
Enzymatic pretreatment combined with real-time NASBA successfully distinguished infectious from heat-inactivated human norovirus, demonstrating that the virus survives for at least 10 days on refrigerated lettuce and turkey.
A novel enzymatic pretreatment combined with real-time NASBA can successfully distinguish infectious from noninfectious human norovirus, revealing its persistence on refrigerated foods for at least 10 days.
May refine foodborne norovirus surveillance; leaves open human risk validation from animal data.
Noroviruses (NoV) are the major cause of nonbacterial gastroenteritis. However, there is no published study to ascertain their survival on foodstuffs which are directly related to human health risk. In the present study, we developed a rapid, simple, and sensitive real-time nucleic acid sequence-based amplification (NASBA) combined with an enzymatic treatment for distinguishing infectious from noninfectious human NoV. The developed method was validated using spiked ready-to-eat food samples. When feline calicivirus (FCV) was used as a NoV surrogate in the preliminary assays, it appeared more sensitive to heat inactivation and enzymatic pretreatment than the human NoV. This suggests that FCV may not be an ideal model for studying NoV. Our results reveal clearly that the developed enzymatic pretreatment/real-time NASBA combination successfully distinguished the infectious from heat-inactivated NoV. Moreover, we demonstrate that NoV survived for at least 10 days on refrigerated ready-to-eat foods, such as lettuce and turkey. However, the survival rate was higher on turkey than on lettuce, probably because of their different surface natures. The approach developed in this study may be suitable for more in-depth studies of the persistence and inactivation of human NoV and may be applied to other nonculturable RNA viruses. Moreover, the evaluation of infectious NoV survival provided valuable information concerning its persistence on ready-to-eat food.
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Lamhoujeb et al. (2008) studied Norovirus contamination. Enzymatic pretreatment combined with real-time NASBA vs. Conventional molecular methods without enzymatic pretreatment was evaluated on Differentiation of infectious from noninfectious human norovirus and persistence on food surfaces. Enzymatic pretreatment combined with real-time NASBA successfully distinguished infectious from heat-inactivated human norovirus, demonstrating that the virus survives for at least 10 days on refrigerated lettuce and turkey.
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