ABSTRACT
Today more than ever before, the public is concerned about the safety of the food that it consumes. Food producers and processors want to provide safe food, but they also want to minimize production costs by shipping their products more quickly. Prior to the 1980s, foods were tested for the pres ence of pathogens primarily by conventional culture procedures, which are labor intensive and time consuming. There was obviously a clear need for rapid, accurate microbiological methods. Advances in biotechnology have made it possible to utilize the power of immunology to detect foodborne pathogens (Feng, 1996).
