Source attribution of human salmonellosis - Adjusting Danish methods to the German needs

Salmonellosis in humans is one of the major zoonotic diseases in Germany. Although a decrease in reported salmonellosis cases could be observed during the last years, still 30.9 cases per 100,000 inhabitants (25,307 cases) have been reported in Germany in 2010 (1). To reduce the exposure for the consumer it is important to identify and quantify the contribution of the different zoonotic sources to human infections.Within MedVetNet WP28 aimed at applying different methods to attribute human salmonellosis to the responsible sources, compared methods and results, and made recommendations on which approach to choose to answer specific risk management questions. One of these methods is the microbial subtyping approach, whose principle is to compare the subtypes of isolates from different sources (e.g. animals, food) with subtypes isolated from humans. Following this approach a source attribution model as described by Hald et al. (2) was adapted to Salmonella surveillance data from several European countries. The adaptations of the model were successful for four countries but did not succeed for Germany. In 2011, during a short term mission at the National Food Institute, DTU, we reimplemented the original Danish source attribution model for Salmonella surveillance data from Germany and adjusted the model specifications according to the German data structure.