Illness caused by a majority of Salmonella serotypes range for mild to severe gastroenteritis, and some in patients, bacteraemia, septicemia and a variety of associated longer-term condition.
The onset symptoms can take anywhere from 6 to 72 hours, but usually occurs around 12 hours after consuming the contaminated food or beverage. In typhoid fever, the incubation period is 7 – 14 days.
Persons with salmonellosis often become carriers of the organism for a period of time after they recovered from the disease. That is, they continue to discharge the organisms in their feces. Because of this, carriers often contaminate their hands with these organisms that may not be removed completely even after thorough washing.
Salmonella species cause illness by means of infection, the organism grows and multiplies in the host’s body and become established on or on the cells or tissue of the host.
Salmonella multiply in the small intestine, colonizing and subsequently invading the intestine issue, producing an enterotoxin and causing an inflammatory reaction and diarrhea.
Salmonella is a type of organism called a bacterium. The salmonella bacteria are rod-shaped called bacillus; they do not form spores, and thus are not especially heat resistant. They are motile (can move about in the water, in foods or other materials in which they are found) and will grow either with or without air (oxygen).
These organisms are very widespread. Like many other kinds of bacteria, Salmonella is able to produce infection when it enters a person’s body.
From the time of probably the first laboratory confirmed outbreak of salmonellosis in 1888, Worldwide, salmonellosis is a leading cause of enteric infectious disease attributable to foods and hundreds of outbreaks of foodborne salmonellosis still occur in most countries every year.
Salmonellosis
