Investigating the effect of phage on reducing Salmonella spp. in poultry meat: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Salmonella represents a notable food-borne health threat in the European Union, primarily transmitted through poultry meat. Consequently, there is an augmented regulatory emphasis on poultry safety. However, chemical treatments can degrade meat's organoleptic quality, necessitating innovative contamination-reduction strategies. A promising approach for the biological control of food-borne diseases is lytic bacteriophages. Although several factors affect the effectiveness of phage treatments, relevant interaction studies are limited, and current research is still in its infancy. Also, it has yet to be determined to what extent environmental factors influence bacterial susceptibility to phage infections. This paper provides a systematic review of such studies and a meta-analysis of pooled data obtained in each article. This study aimed to investigate the effect of various factors on phage function in reducing Salmonella spp. in poultry meat. The PubMed, Science Direct, and Scopus databases thoroughly searched for material written in English. The twenty included recordings showed that the overall Salmonella reduction rate was 1.729 log CFU/cm2 (CI = 95%, 1.548, 1.910, p-value> 0.001, P chi 2>0.001). Salmonella was more resistant to a temperature of 25 degrees C than 4 degrees C. This research also demonstrates that as bacterial and phage doses increase, Salmonella levels reduce. In contrast, phage activity rises with time, and phage therapy is more effective against S. enteritidis than other species.