transmission sources might be invol

transmission sources might be involved in CDI. Since C. difficile is
also a farm animal pathogen, meat products are potential reservoirs
of C. difficile (Hoover and Rodriguez-Palacios, 2013). Several reports
have demonstrated that C. difficile is present in meat products,
including but not limited to ground beef and pork, turkey, vacuumpacked
meat, and various meat sausages. Although convincing
evidence is still lacking, the presence of C. difficile spores in foods
suggests the foodborne transmission of C. difficile (Hoover and
Rodriguez-Palacios, 2013). Therefore, C. difficile could be considered
a zoonotic pathogen transmitted by farm animals, foods and
water.
Food transmission of C. difficile implies that C. difficile spores
survive common environmental stressors found in industrial food
processing and handling steps. To date, only one study has
addressed the ability of C. difficile spores of various strains to survive
at the heating temperatures typically used in meat processing.
Their results demonstrated that C. difficile spores are able to survive
2 h at 71 C, and that a 10-min treatment at 85 C inactivates only
~90% of the spore strains (Rodriguez-Palacios et al., 2010), suggesting
that current commercial thermal processing practices may
be insufficient to reduce C. difficile spores to an acceptable level.