In Summary
- Although limited, research has found that non-lined reusable crates for transporting fish can be a source of L. monocytogenes contamination. If they are used, they should be cleaned and sanitised between different batches of fish.
There is limited literature available relating to the contamination of fish crates, but there is some evidence that if they are not lined, reusable transport crates can act as fomites. For instance, two different salmon suppliers had the same L. monocytogenes biotype isolated from their fish. Product tracing was not effective enough to determine if both batches of the fish had been caught by the same fishing boat (Thimone et al. 2002) as part of the same shoal; or if imperfectly cleaned crates were a source of cross contamination between different catches of fish. A study of fish processing factories in Greece also detected L. monocytogenes on the boxes used to transport fish (Soultos et al. 2007; Jami et al. 2014). A French paper showed that there were genetically indistinguishable L. monocytogenes biotypes on fish sourced from Scotland and Norway (Dauphin et al., 2001). A plausible explanation for that finding was that the transport crates weren’t cleaned and sanitised between different batches of fish. EFSA have published an opinion on fish transport containers, although it is focussed on the context of microbial growth and scrombrotoxin (EFSA, 2020).
