Working for public and animal health

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Food safety

VLA provides consultancy and advice to Government, agencies and other national and international bodies on microbiological and chemical food safety issues on farms and their environment.

Click on the links below for more detailed information on our role in these areas of work.

• Chemical food safety
• Antimicrobial resistance
• Epidemiology of foodborne zoonoses
• Sustainable methods of control
• Virulence and zoonotic determinants

Chemical food safety

• Provide radionuclide analysis of milk, crops, animals and other samples collected under the Terrestrial and Food and Agriculture radioactivity monitoring programmes.

• Provide specialist chemical food safety expertise including emergency response for the investigation of on-farm food safety incidents in England and Wales.

• Advise and provide consultancy on the presence of chemical hazards in meat, animal products and feedstuffs.

Antimicrobial resistance

• Provide data for the identification of trends and sources of antimicrobial resistance of salmonella and other bacteria.

• Ensure this data is comparable with that produced from other national and international agencies on human and food isolates.

• Apply epidemiological and molecular approaches and model systems to improve our understanding of the acquisition, maintenance and spread of antimicrobial resistance in animals and the environment.

Epidemiology of foodborne zoonoses

• Provide accredited data on trends and sources of salmonella and other zoonotic agents in animals and feedstuffs in Great Britain.

• Provide specialist microbiological and epidemiological food safety expertise including emergency response for the investigation of on-farm food safety incidents in England and Wales associated with human outbreaks.

• Apply epidemiological, risk modelling and molecular approaches to improve our understanding of the acquisition, maintenance and spread of foodborne zoonoses in animals and their environment including processing plants and abattoirs.

• Apply novel phenotypic or genotypic approaches to the rapid detection of foodborne pathogens.

Sustainable methods of control

• Validate and assess the efficacy of non-antimicrobial methods of controlling foodborne zoonotic infections in animals with particular reference to salmonella, campylobacter and  verotoxin producing Escherichia coli (VTEC).

• Apply  new  research  observations including  advances  in  genome sequencing and post-genomic strategies, to develop novel control methods for campylobacter and VTEC.

Virulence & zoonotic determinants of foodborne zoonoses

• Apply molecular methods to characterise and understand the population structures of foodborne zoonotic pathogens in order to inform risk assessments by linking detection of hazard with risk of survival and to human health.

• Investigate advances in genome sequencing and post-genomic strategies to differentiate pathogenic and zoonotic organisms from others isolated along the foodchain.

• Provide fundamental information on the host-pathogen interactions to assist development of control strategies.