Campylobacter

All right, so now I'm going to ask you to remember post-infections and remember respiratory infection a week to six weeks before Guillain-Barre syndrome starts.

Infection with the bacteria Campylobacter jejuni, which causes diarrhea, is one of the most common triggers for GBS, they say.

Then they say viral infections can cause Guillain-Barre syndrome.

Some people with GBS have had the flu or infections with cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Barr virus, Zika virus, or other viruses.

Uh, the raw diets, uh, that I mentioned earlier, are much more risky because, uh, typically those are gonna be uncooked, and you don't really know how long they've been, uh, at what temperature and how they've been handled.

And so that would be more like the Salmonella and Campylobacter.

Definitely like with all of the produce, like with Cyclospora and any of the pathogens, uh, look for recalls, and if there is a recall, kind of look at your brand of dog food that you're feeding.

And then, uh, there's a recent study that I'm, have mentioned earlier, uh, with a really large number of dogs that showed that actually a, a very, uh, large variety of ingredients that are home-cooked is actually one of the best things that you can do.

Those crowded, waste-soaked, ammonia-filled conditions are a perfect incubator for bacteria.

When you cram tens of thousands of stressed, immune-compromised birds into a filthy shed, you create ideal breeding grounds for pathogens like salmonella and Campylobacter.

This is not speculation.

Testing by the United States Department of Agriculture and independent researchers has repeatedly found significant contamination on raw chicken.

You also have bacteria, which can cause it too.

Campylobacter is a big one.

C. diff, Clostridium giardia is a cute little protozoa that can actually make you sick too.

You have E. coli.

In this country, there are a lot of food safety problems are caused by foodborne pathogens.

Um, you know, in poultry, mainly, uh, from Salmonella, Campylobacter, right? Those kind of foodborne pathogens.

So they are bacteria.

Um, but from the other angle when you're looking to safety, it's also chemical, right? Is there any drug residues? Uh, and when we say in chicken, in poultry, could be, you know, the antibiotics that we gave to the birds, right, wh- while we raise them.

It's not just Salmonella or it's not just the antibiotics.

So, um, so now since we have dissect this into two portions, and then we'll dive into this, um, bacteria first or foodborne pathogens.

As we mentioned, you know, the top foodborne pathogens in poultry, they are Salmonella and Campylobacter.

Salmonella is regulated by USDA, um, so the poultry industry is obligated to reduce Salmonella.

I show you here a result of a meta-analysis.

I think all know that most of the causes of travel or diarrhea is bacteria, mostly it's E. coli and teratoptogenic or others, but with a number of Campylobacter, Salmonella and Shigella, that is also important.

So again, I show you before

that actually diarrhea in solid organ transplant recipients may be more harmful than in the general population.

Here is again data from the Swiss Transplant Core Study.

We saw that actually Campylobacter in Switzerland is the most common pathogen that causes gastroenteritis with up to 5% of our transplant population.

And what I wanted to show here is that actually the risk for invasive infection in this patient is much, much higher than in the general population.

You can see that up to almost 8% of patients had invasive infection with bacteremia.

Right.

And the sources state these practices drastically cut down the transmission cycles of common zoonotic bacteria like Salmonella and Campylobacter.

But how does a mundane task like washing hands actually defeat a global pathogen like Campylobacter?

If we connect this to the bigger picture, it is all about structural destruction.

Pathogens like Salmonella and Campylobacter rely on specific unbroken chains of transmission, usually from an animal's waist to your hands to your mouth or your food.

Gross, but true.

But these bacteria are structurally vulnerable.

And so we're trying to update those using all of the data that we've pulled about every single drinking water supply in New Zealand, and then linking that with enteric disease rates to work out what number of people are likely getting sick from drinking water each year.

And of course, not just getting sick, but sometimes dying, right? So there was the Campylobacter outbreak that killed several people a few years ago.

Yeah, and made a whole town sick, so 8,000 people sick before people died.

Tragically, and that's what sparked a lot of the water reforms that you see today, the three waters and also the establishment of Tomataraway.