A sparked interest has a way of starting a fire, and if Dr. Steven Foley?s research continues to develop, he could set the medical and farming worlds ablaze.
Foley, an assistant professor of biology at UCA, first experienced the disease Escherichia coli (E. coli) when he was young.
In school he had a teacher whose 5-year-old son contracted the disease from eating undercooked meat. It took 13 surgeries for the boy to lead a normal life again.
Later Foley went on to work for the Food and Drug Administration, which peaked his interest for food safety. ?We were looking for ways to track [food] from the farm to the fork,? he said.
Now Foley?s interest has expanded beyond food safety, he wants to combat the disease before it develops. To Foley, preventing the E. coli, a disease that affects 270,000 people in the U.S. each year, is key.
Eating rare or undercooked meat like ground beef or chicken is the most common way of getting E. coli. The bacteria have also been found in deer, sheep and pigs. Many times the disease does not affect the animals but does harm the consumer.
Foley is investigating ways to prevent infection starting with a form of avian E. coli (found in poultry).
E. coli bacteria are normally found in human and animal intestines to help breakdown food. Most of the strains are harmless, but some strain can cause severe illness such as diarrhea and kidney damage. Foley is examining DNA from harmful strains of E. coli to search for markers in the various forms of the disease to determine what in the gene keeps it from being killed by the bird?s immune system.
If Foley can identify the source of the harmful strains of E. coli, scientists can then create vaccines instead of antibiotics for the poultry.
The use of antibiotics in poultry can be harmful to the human population because those drugs can be passed from the chicken to the consumer and can further the problem of antibiotic resistance the medical community has become aware of in recent years.
Antibiotic resistance has become a growing threat in the U.S., and in the past few years organizations such as the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control have started campaigns to increase public awareness of the abuse of antibiotics.
Even though resistance can come from simple practices like patients not taking their full prescription of an antibiotic, it can also come from food-producing animals who are given antibiotics for production reasons, and those drugs can cause the human system to become resistant to drugs treating a human illness.
“The fact that we can probably help reduce antibiotic resistance by treating animals disease will help prevent a lot of resistant human disease is like killing two birds with one stone,? he said. ?We’re helping animal disease and preventing bad human diseases.”
-Rachel Roberts
