Newer, Faster Way to Test for Food Bacteria Developed by Arkansas Company

Arkansas based Litmus LLC states they have developed a faster way to test for e.coli and salmonella in food.

Based in Little Rock, Litmus LLC has created a test for common food pathogens that will take as little as 15 minutes instead of the standard two to three days. For the last two years this company has been working with the USDA's National Center for Toxicological Research at White Hall to develop a test that producers and growers can use to test for bacteria in their food that may lead to illness. The test Litmus developed is called the Rapid-B test. The normal way of testing for food bacteria takes two steps. The first step is to grow a culture from a food sample, and step two of this process is to send the culture to a laboratory were experts review the culture. This process then usually takes 48 hours or longer to come up with the results. However, the Rapid-B test is able to bypass the culture growing process causing the Rapid-B test to identify bacteria in roughly 15 minutes. Ted Moskal, president of Litmus-Rapid-B, a subsidiary of Litmus and the commercial partner for the NCTR (National Center for Toxicological Research ), states food samples are swabbed with a collection device, and then mixed together with agents that can identify the bacteria present on these samples. Mr.Moskal notes this type of testing can be done in the field instead of the laboratory. Moskal notes that the Rapid-B tests counts individual bacteria, and because of this the Rapid-B does not come back with false positives or false negatives. Faster testing will allow for faster identification of bacteria in food and thus allow for less break outs and spreading of disease. Considering that roughly 76 million illnesses in the U.S. annually are caused by tainted food, the quicker someone can identify the cause of the illness, the better chance there will be in stopping the illness from spreading.