Vitamin E Supplements In Turkeys Helps People

WASHINGTON - Jan 16/04 - SNS -- Supplementing turkey feed with Vitamin E could reduce the chance people will contract the foodborne illness, Listeria when they eat the meat from the bird.

That's what Agricultural Research Service scientists and their colleagues found when studying ways to control Listeria monocytogenes, a major human bacterial foodborne pathogen found in poultry. ARS is the chief scientific research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Microbiologist Irene Wesley of the ARS National Animal Disease Center (NADC) in Ames, Iowa, found that supplementing turkeys' diets with the vitamin stimulates their immune responses, helping them clear the gut of the microorganism that causes the disease. This can in turn lead to reduced contamination of carcasses at slaughter and during processing. Wesley is part of NADC's Pre-Harvest Food Safety and Enteric Diseases Research Unit.

Listeria monocytogenes causes listeriosis, a disease that affects mainly pregnant women, newborns, and adults with weakened immune systems. It accounts for 2,500 total cases annually of human meningitis, encephalitis, sepsis, fetal death and premature births. In a 1998 USDA study, L. monocytogenes was found in nearly 6 percent of turkey carcass rinses and in 31 percent of the ground turkey meat examined.

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