Campylobacter vaccine

Campylobacter jejuni is a common source of food poisoning in Australia, and is in fact, according to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the leading cause of food borne illness in the USA.

It is commonly associated with eating uncooked food, especially chicken and beef, or by drinking water contaminated by faeces.

It is the cause of the syndrome known as “Traveller’s Diarrhoea” (TD), which often afflicts tourists in tropical countries such as Mexico or Thailand. It also affects those not travelling including, in 2008, C.jejuni caused more than 200 cases of food poisoning at a British Columbia bike race.

Recently a team from the University of Guelph in Canada announced that they have worked with the U.S. Navy to develop a sugar-based vaccination that may prevent “traveller’s diarrhoea”.

Mario Monteiro, from the University of Guelph, the main driver of this development, explained that he and his team chose to create a vaccine for C. jejuni because “it is a major source of food poisoning in the developing world and the U.S. military… the recent appearance of antibiotic resistant bacterial strains has now created a need for this type of research.”

So far it has been tested with a 100% success rate on monkeys, with no illness shown. This means that the process can work through to human trials however, the actual vaccine will most likely not be available for public use for about 10 years.