Campylobacter Species, Microbiological Source Tracking and Risk Assessment of Bacterial pathogens

Campylobacter species continue to remain critical pathogens of public health interest. They are responsible for approximately 500 million cases of gastroenteritis per year worldwide. Infection occurs through the consumption of contaminated food and water. Microbial risk assessment and source tracking are crucial epidemiological strategies to monitor the outbreak of campylobacteriosis effectively. Various methods have been proposed for microbial source tracking and risk assessment, most of which rely on conventional microbiological techniques such as detecting fecal indicator organisms and other novel microbial source tracking methods, including library-dependent microbial source tracking and library-independent source tracking approaches. However, both the traditional and novel methods have their setbacks. For example, while the conventional techniques are associated with a poor correlation between indicator organism and pathogen presence, on the other hand, it is impractical to interpret qPCR-generated markers to establish the exact human health risks even though it can give information regarding the potential source and relative human risk. Therefore, this article provides up-to-date information on campylobacteriosis, various approaches for source attribution, and risk assessment of bacterial pathogens, including next-generation sequencing approaches such as shotgun metagenomics, which effectively answer the questions of potential pathogens are there and in what quantities.