preview

How Campylobacter Jejuni Is The Most Common Cause Of Food Poisoning Essay

Decent Essays

Campylobacter jejuni is a species of bacteria from the genus Campylobacter, and one of the most frequent causes of bacterial infections worldwide. The genome sequence of C. jejuni is 1,641,481bp (Parkhill et al, 2000). C. jejuni is the most common cause of food poisoning. Despite its strong pathogenicity with gastroenteritis (Kim et al, 2015), C. jejuni is rarely life threatening but is linked with the development of Guillain-barre syndrome (Perez-Perez & Blaser, 1996).

C. jejuni is a gram-negative bacterium (Phongsisay V, 2016) as well as being microaerophilic (Kim et al, 2015), nonfermenting and helical shaped (Frirdich et al, 2014). C. jejuni may have either a uni or bi-polar flagella, which contain rods enabling its motility (Baldvinsson et al, 2014). When translated from Greek C. jejuni means ‘curved rod’: campylos (curved) and baktron (rod), named due to its properties.

C. jejuni is such a diverse species that it has been questioned if it should be contained in one genus (Gulbronson et al, 2016). It is also considered to be among the most important bacterial species due to its impact on public health and microbiology. You will commonly find C. jejuni in animal faeces and food (Kim et al, 2015).

Infections caused by C. jejuni are most frequently found in patients who are immunocompromised, elderly or young. The bacterium is not responsible for serious harm in healthy individuals but those with a poor immune system may be unable to remove the bacterium, leading to an

Get Access