NOTTINGHAM, England, May 27 (UPI) -- British scientists have developed a way to cut the contamination of chickens by the foodborne bacterium Campylobacter jejuni.
A spokesman for Nottingham University said Thursday the research team has been using bacterial viruses to target and kill the organism.
Researchers isolated a number of naturally occurring bacterial viruses that can infect and kill campylobacter bacteria from the feces of chickens. They then used these bacteriophage to treat chickens that were infected with campylobacter.
"Campylobacter bacteriophage are naturally present in chickens and have no recorded detrimental effect on the health of chickens or human beings," says Catherine Loc-Carrillo, a researcher on the study.
"In nature a balance exists between predator and prey which allows both (the bacterium and the bacteriophage) to flourish. Here the use of bacteriophage to reduce campylobacters within the chicken gut merely involves shifting nature's balance in our favor for a short period of time. This time point should be just prior to when the birds are sent for slaughter."
This brief shifting of nature's balance, in this case, resulted in a 100- to 100,000 fold reduction in the number of bacteria in the chickens' intestines over a 3-day period.
