Molecular Epidemiology of Foodborne Diseases

Epidemiology is a branch of medicine responsible for the study of cause, distribution, and determinants of disease that helps in preventing and controlling the disease. Molecular epidemiology was developed by merging epidemiological studies with molecular biology. By merging these two techniques, there was a development of laboratory techniques, which could be applied on large sample sizes that assist epidemiologists to conduct epidemiological studies at molecular levels. The basic concept in medical epidemiology is that there may be harmful microorganism or problematic chemical present in the food that cause disease. There are different foodborne diseases having different etiologies including bacterial, fungal, viral, and parasitic. These diseases result in serious illness prevalence of every 1/10 people in the world, 420,000 deaths/year of which 30% are children under 5 years, and 14.5% are hospitalized cases. So by keeping in view the importance of molecular epidemiology in diagnoses and treatment of foodborne diseases, this chapter focuses on foodborne diseases, their causative microorganisms and their diagnoses through molecular technologies, like immunoassay, in situ high-affinity capture and staining method, biosensors, optical biosensors, polymerase chain reaction PCR assay, potentiometry, etc.