Bioterrorism is an event in a civil setting that is equivalent to an epidemic in a medical scenario. The collaboration between medicine and public health is also important in the clinical diagnostics and epidemiological surveillance in response to the emergence of a biological agent.

The malicious contamination of food for terrorist purposes is a real and current threat, and deliberate contamination of food at one location could have global health implications. The key to prevent food terrorism is to enhance existing food safety programmes in order to protect food production systems. Typical food safety management programmes within the food industry include good manufacturing practice and “hazard analysis and critical control point” – HACCP. Food irradiation could be one additional food safety tool that serves as a complement to other food safety technologies such as the HACCP.

With the purpose to apply the food irradiation as a food safety tool, the Radiation Technology group at the ITN is developing a project entitled “Sanitation of chicken egg by ionizing radiation”, which applies the decontaminating capacity of the ionising radiation to inactivate pathogenic microorganisms in eggs. Salmonella spp. and Campylobacter spp. are eggs natural contaminants and the leading causes of bacterial gastroenteritis in humans. In this study, the D_values of reference strains of Salmonella and Campylobacter were determined and sub‐lethal gamma radiation doses were applied to artificially contaminated eggs, in order to predict which irradiation dose could guarantee egg sanitation. Based on the results obtained and to guarantee organoleptic acceptable and safe eggs, a radicidation dose of 1.5 kGy is thus proposed.

Monitoring programmes with a rapid follow‐up are important if variation in product is seen that could indicate deliberate contamination. Since a reliable detection step to identify the hazard is crucial in any production process, we validated a PCR method to detect Salmonella and Campylobacter contamination, directly from eggs and egg‐products.