Chicken meat is an infection source of Salmonella serovar infantis for humans in Japan.

Abstract Background: The study sets out to either confirm or refute a recent study's findings that chicken meat is an unlikely source of Salmonella enterica subspecies enterica serovar Infantis (Salmonella Infantis) in humans in the Kyushu-Okinawa region, Japan. Methods: A total of 74 Salmonella Infantis isolates (30 from human and 44 from other sources), mainly from the Kyushu-Okinawa region in south-western Japan, were analyzed using a molecular-epidemiological approach combining two fingerprinting methods, namely pulsed-field gel electrophoresis and amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP), a novel polymerase chain reaction-based technique. Results: The resulting pulsed-field profiles showed that 17 of 30 human isolates were similar to those found in chicken meat, whereas there were no common pulsed-field profiles between human and chicken egg isolates. Overall, 3 of 18 AFLP profiles included 7 human isolates and 14 chicken egg isolates. In addition, the combined results of the pulsed-field gel el...