Study: Warming May Bring Heightened Salmonella Risk

Living along the shoreline may be nice, but a new study suggests that as climate change makes extreme weather and temperature events more frequent, cases of salmonella poisoning may become more prevalent, too, especially in some coastal communities.

Each year, it is estimated that 1 million people in the United States become sickened from salmonella.  The stomach-crippling illness is caused by a bacteria that occurs naturally in the gut of many animals, such as cows and chickens.

These bacteria often travel with the waste of the animal, which can transfer the pathogen to water or soil used to grow crops.  Salmonella spreads easily with contact, which makes lots of organisms subject to infection.

Kristi S. Shaw, a researcher at the University of Maryland School of Public Health and co-author of the study, published this month in the journal Environment International, said she and her fellow researchers set out to determine how environmental conditions affect salmonella outbreaks.

“Salmonella, just like any bacteria that responds well to heat, is going to spread whenever you have warmer temperatures,” Shaw said.  “We wanted to look past outbreaks caused by a group of people getting sick at a church cookout or something like that, to the less defined outbreaks caused by environmental variables like temperature.”

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