Environmental monitoring shows SARS-CoV-2 contamination of surfaces in food plants
The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic caused by the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), has presented new challenges to food manufacturers.
Environmental monitoring for foodborne pathogens such as Listeria and Salmonella are routinely conducted in food production facilities. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it is an additional challenge to protect the personnel in the food production facilities and mitigate the transmission of the virus from the facilities.
Histogram of percentage of positive cases for each individual plant (n=116). Image Credit: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.12.10.20247171v1.full.pdf
Ziwen Ming
et al. have recently investigated SARS-CoV-2 on surfaces in food plants. The team from the Institute of Environmental Health has tested for the presence of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in 22 643 surface samples from the food processing facilities in the