Everyone needs food to survive, but when consumers eat at a restaurant or consume meat, they put an incredible amount of trust in the people who handle their food.

Restaurants and meat-packing plants are hubs for bacterial activity, but Iowa State researchers have found a way to make them safer.

Before meat products even get to restaurants, they go through meat-packing plants. With recent E. coli scares, one may begin to question the methods of these plants. The food is inspected, but current inspections leave much to be desired.

Meat-packing plants use visual inspection and biological testing via swabs to detect contamination. These methods are not always successful.

“Most inspection is visually based … that’s not the optimal way to do it,” said Jacob Petrich, professor of chemistry. “You’re not going to catch everything.”

It is impossible to examine the hundreds of carcasses that travel through meat-packing plants and find every speck of contamination with the naked eye. It is also unlikely that packers will swab the entire animal, meaning contamination can get through.

To solve the problem, Mark Rasmussen, director of the Leopold Center, and Tom Casey, retired member of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s research service, sought the help of Petrich in 1996. Petrich has been working on it ever since, using light as a solution.

“We study the applications of fluorescent spectroscopy in many fields, which includes the detection of food contamination,” said Kalyan Santra, graduate assistant in chemistry who works with Petrich.

Petrich and his team found that chlorophyll, which is present in cow feces because of their grass diets, returns red light when blue light is cast on it.

Using this strategy, meat carcasses can be passed through blue light-emitting scanners that show where feces contamination is located. Petrich and his team developed detectors that were capable of doing this.

The detectors were also capable of detecting fluorescent central nervous system tissue. When central nervous system tissue gives off a strong glow in the scanner, it means there is a buildup of tissue called lipofuscin.

Lipofuscin is a direct result of damage to central nervous system tissue, and the more of it there is, the brighter the tissue will shine in the detector.

By shining blue light through an animal’s eyes, Petrich and his team could determine if there was enough central nervous system damage to say whether the animal had a neural disease, such as mad cow disease.

The detectors go beyond animals and are able to detect human fecal matter. Human feces return light differently than animal feces, but the detector is able to decipher the difference. Putting Petrich’s detectors in restaurants would go a long way in stopping the spread of disease.

Petrich hopes the detectors his team developed will one day be used to fight the spread of disease everywhere.

“It was our dream to put detectors in every restaurant, daycare center, school, hospital and nursing home,” Petrich said.