A review on Implications of Interaction between Human Pathogenic Bacteria and Host on Food Quality and Disease

Abstract

Studies suggest that increasing health awareness has resulted in a significant increase in the demand for ready-to-eat fresh produce. However, several reports indicate the emergence and outbreaks of food-borne illness that have been found to be closely associated with fresh fruits and vegetables; therefore, researchers across the globe have been focusing on identifying microbial contamination of fresh produce (Tomasi et al., 2015; Mir et al., 2018). Until the advent of this century, much research was focused on studying the interaction of enteric pathogens with human and animal hosts and food-borne illness was believed to be result of postharvest microbial contaminations. Recently, the notion has been significantly questioned in the scientific community and, therefore, much research in today’s scenario is focused on the ecology of enteric pathogens on plant surfaces. Previously, enteric pathogens were known to colonize human or animal digestive tract, an environment that provides protection from external environmental factors and also provided a variety of easily accessible nutrients. However, recently documented reports suggest that enteric pathogens colonize the phyllosphere and the rhizosphere of plants. In the present section, we shed light on the most important and classical examples of enteric pathogens that are known to be associated with food-borne illnesses of fresh fruits and vegetables.