Abstract

Food producing animals can be reservoirs of Campylobacter, a leading bacterial cause of human foodborne illness. Campylobacter spp. utilize amino acids as major carbon and energy substrates, a process that can be inhibited by thymol and diphenyliodonium chloride (DIC). To determine the effect of these potential additives on feed intake, live weight gain, and gut Campylobacter levels, growing pigs were fed standard grower diets supplemented with or without 0.0067 or 0.0201% thymol or 0.00014 or 0.00042% DIC in a replicated study design. Diets were offered twice daily for 7 days, during which time daily feed intake (mean ± SEM, 2.39 ± 0.06 kg day(-1)) and daily gain (0.62 ± 0.04 kg day(-1)) were unaffected (P > 0.05) by treatment. Pigs treated with DIC but not thymol tended to have lower rectal Campylobacter levels (P ∼ 0.07) (5.2 versus 4.2 and 4.4 log CFU g(-1) rectal contents for controls and 0.00014% DIC and 0.00042% DIC, respectively; SEM ∼ 0.26). However, DIC or thymol treatments did not affect (P > 0.05) ileal or cecal Campylobacter (1.6 ± 0.17 and 4.5 ± 0.26 log CFU g(-1), respectively), cecal total culturable anaerobes (9.8 ± 0.10 log CFU g(-1)), or accumulations of major fermentation end products within collected gut contents. These results suggest that thymol and DIC were appreciably absorbed, degraded, or otherwise made unavailable in the proximal alimentary tract and that encapsulation technologies will likely be needed to deliver effective concentrations of these compounds to the lower gut to achieve in vivo reductions of Campylobacter.

Links

Publisher Full Text

Authors

Anderson RC, Krueger NA, Genovese KJ, Stanton TB, Mackinnon KM, Harvey RB, Edrington TS, Callaway TR, Nisbet AJ

Institution

U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Southern Plains Agricultural Research Center, Food & Feed Safety Research Unit, College Station, TX 77845, USA. robin.anderson@ars.usda.gov

Source

Journal of food protection 75:4 2012 Apr pg 758-61

MeSH

Animal Feed
Animals
Biphenyl Compounds
Campylobacter
Cecum
Colony Count, Microbial
Disease Reservoirs
Dose-Response Relationship, Drug
Feces
Fermentation
Food Contamination
Humans
Onium Compounds
Swine
Thymol
Weight Gain

Pub Type(s)

Journal Article
Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

Language

eng

PubMed ID

22488067