Poultry Salmonella Project Wins Capstone Expo Policy Category

Posted May 8, 2015

Farmaceuticals, a senior design project addressing salmonella incidence in humans through poultry feed and sponsored by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), took the top honor in the public policy category during the Spring 2015 Capstone Design Expo held Thursday, April 23, in McCamish Pavilion.

More than 1,000 students and 200 teams participated in this year's Expo. Undergraduates from senior design courses in eleven schools worked with real-world, open-ended, interdisciplinary challenges proposed by industrial and research project sponsors. Participating involved tenacity, teamwork, and presentation. The three public policy entries showcased in the Spring 2015 Expo were advised by Associate Professor Kimberly Isett and Professor Diana Hicks. The two other team projects, also sponsored by the CDC, were Better Call Salmonella, a study of health interventions in communities of color, and Up With the White and Mold, a project on healthy homes.

Farmaceuticals, the winning project, was conducted by team members Brittany Dodson, Sam Lancaster, Jason Lupuloff, and Aaron Peek. Their project was spurred on by a lack of incentives to reduce Salmonella in the pre-production phase of poultry rearing, despite the danger of Salmonella on the farm translating to human salmonellosis if the bacteria is not killed before consumption.

Based on the use of feed additives such as essential oils and probiotics to significantly reduce this risk, the goal of the research project was threefold: to identify what percent of poultry feed supplemented with probiotics and essential oils is necessary to reduce Salmonella incidence in humans; to determine the necessary poultry market penetrations for this new approach to have an impact on public health; and to calculaate the economic impact of the introduction of antimicrobials on society and industry.

Project judges ranged from professors to industry professionals in a wide variety of disciplines and evaluated student research on creativity, utility, quality of analysis, proof of function, and communication.