Detection of viruses in food -: Actual status

Viruses are one of the main causes of human gastroenteritis. Besides person to person transmission, virus contaminated foods are one of the sources of infection. This raises the necessity to analyze foods for viral contaminations. The most critical point the analysis is the recovery of viruses from foods or from food surfaces, concentration of viral particles and subsequent extraction of RNA. As examples, methods are described for the recovery of viruses from three different types of foodstuffs. The methods described are methods to detect the most important food transmitted RNA-viruses. Extracted nucleic acids are detected by reverse transcription and PCR. Inhibition is checked by an external amplification control consisting of phage RNA. Detection systems for Noroviruses and Rotaviruses which are used in routine diagnostics are described. Verification of the PCR products can be done by DNA sequencing or hybridisation with an oligonucleotide probe. If it is necessary to close epidemiological links, PCR products shall be sequenced. The methods described in this work are applied in several laboratories and should be the basis of further method development.