News Release

Returning travellers could highlight emerging infections worldwide

Peer-Reviewed Publication

BMC (BioMed Central)

Though picking up a Salmonella infection abroad could ruin your holiday, reporting it to your doctor could help detect emerging infections in tourist destinations, according to an article published today in BMC Medicine. A comprehensive database containing details of the infections that travellers pick up could help inform countries that have limited surveillance systems about possible disease outbreaks.

In Sweden, all reported cases of Salmonella infection must be entered into the Swedish Infectious Disease Register, detailing the type of bacteria that caused the infection and the place where the infection was contracted. Karin Nygård and her colleague used this database to assess whether there had been any changes in the numbers or types of Salmonella infection from different geographical regions between 1997 and 2002.

Their analyses of 13,271 cases of Salmonella infection in Swedes showed that 87% of these infections were contracted abroad. Most infections were reported from Spain, Greece and Turkey, mainly reflecting the popularity of these travel destinations for Swedish charter tourism.

The researchers also spotted that the numbers of diagnoses of a previously rare type of Salmonella Enteritidis, known as phage type (PT) 14b, increased dramatically among visitors to Greece during 2001.

PT14b became the third most common type of Salmonella in returning Swedish travellers in 2001, accounting for almost 13% of cases compared with only 2% in the previous four years. This rise may reflect an outbreak caused by a widely distributed contaminated food product in the region, or it may be because PT14b changed at some point during this year, becoming more widespread in the environment.

Dr Nygård believes that if information about increasing infection rates, or new strains of Salmonella, such as this, were communicated rapidly to the affected countries, those countries would be able to swiftly launch investigations into the outbreak and implement appropriate control measures to minimise the spread of infection.

According to the authors, travellers make a good "sentinel system" for infectious disease monitoring, as "people returning from travel abroad may have a higher tendency to seek medical care, and have a stool sample taken if an imported infection is suspected. In addition, visitors may be more susceptible to pathogens circulating in the community than local inhabitants."

However, to be most useful, the data collected from many different countries about infections contracted abroad need to be pooled in order to create a comprehensive infectious diseases database. However, at present, many countries do not collect information on travel history in their surveillance of infectious diseases.

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Salmonella Enteritidis causes around 80% of the cases of Salmonella food poisoning in Europe. Salmonella is normally transferred via eggs and poultry.

This press release is based on the following article:

Emergence of new Salmonella Enteritidis phage types in Europe? – Surveillance of infections in returning travellers as a sentinel system
Karin Nygård, Birgitta de Jong, Philippe J Guerin, Yvonne Andersson, Agneta Olsson, Johan Giesecke
BMC Medicine 2004, 2:32
To be published Thursday 2 September 2004

Upon publication this article will be available free of charge according to BMC Medicine's Open Access policy at: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/2/32

Please quote the journal name in any stories you write, and link to the journal if you are writing for the web.

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For further information about this research contact Birgitta de Jong, Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, 171 82 Solna, Sweden. Email: birgitta.dejong@smi.ki.se, Tel: 46-8457-2369

Alternatively, or for more information about the journal or Open Access publishing contact Gemma Bradley by email at press@biomedcentral.com or by phone on 44-207-631-9931

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BMC Medicine (http://www.biomedcentral.com/bmcmed/) publishes original research articles, technical advances and study protocols in any area of medical science or clinical practice. To be appropriate for BMC Medicine, articles need to be of special importance and broad interest.

BMC Medicine is published by BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com), an independent online publishing house committed to providing Open Access to peer-reviewed biological and medical research. This commitment is based on the view that immediate free access to research and the ability to freely archive and reuse published information is essential to the rapid and efficient communication of science. BioMed Central currently publishes over 100 journals across biology and medicine. In addition to open-access original research, BioMed Central also publishes reviews, commentaries and other non-original-research content. Depending on the policies of the individual journal, this content may be open access or provided only to subscribers.


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