If ever there was a company that has lived up to the old business adage “Find a good solution to an important problem”, it is California based Micro Identification Technologies Inc.
There’s little question about the importance of the issue they are addressing, the growing need for quicker and easier identification of potentially deadly bacteria. The increasing globalization and industrialization of the world’s food supply has made the potential for contamination a threat that can affect food consumers everywhere.
• Microbial contamination, in hospitals and food products, has grown in recent years.
• Accurate identification of contamination typically takes at least 1-3 days, and sometimes up to a week.
• Charges usually run over $100 per test.
A CDC report states that, in the U.S. alone, contaminated food is believed to cause 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths annually, with 45% of the cases the result of bacterial contamination. The current egg scare is just the most recent in a string of major food contamination alerts:
• 2009 – E. coli in Nestle cookie dough sickened 69 people in 29 states.
• 2008 – Salmonella in peppers from Mexico sickened 1,400 people in 43 states.
• 2008 – Salmonella in peanut butter products infected 700 people and killed 9.
• 2007 – E. coli in beef prompted recall of 55 million pounds, with reported outbreaks across 28 states.
Add to all this the fact that pathogens are growing resistant, making a prompt response even more critical.
• S. aureus is a bacterium that lives on the skin or in the nose of a person, and can cause life-threatening diseases such as pneumonia and meningitis.
• MRSA strains of S. aureus are resistant to antibiotics such as methicillin and penicillin.
• In November 2007, the CDC reported that in 2005 over 278,000 people were diagnosed and hospitalized for MRSA related infections.
• CDC reports MRSA events are increasing at a rate from 6% to over 9% annually throughout the U.S.
• MRSA screening of new hospital patients is desired, but the cost and time is considered prohibitive.
• Invasive Infections occur in 94,000 persons each year in the U.S. resulting in roughly 19,000 deaths.
Micro Identification Technologies believes it has the single best solution to this growing concern in the form of a laser detection system called the MIT 1000. It’s the world’s only non-biological automated system for identifying bacteria, using proprietary software to analyze and interpret the complex patterns generated by laser light reflected off the microbes. Compared to traditional methods of identification, the MIT 1000 offers a far quicker, simpler, and less costly way of spotting potentially dangerous contaminates. The system has already been produced for major health agencies such as the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Japanese Ministry of Food Safety.
The need for such improved pathogen identification is reflected in the marketplace, where the revenues for rapid testing methods have expanded at an annual rate of over 9% since 1998, and already exceed $5 billion annually. Current growth projections are at 10.2% annually, reaching $6.2 billion by 2013.
For more information, visit www.micro-identification.com.
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