Viable spores not detected in the household dust of major Canadian cities.

causes infant botulism by colonising the intestines and producing botulinum neurotoxin Previous reports have linked infant botulism cases to spores in household dust, yet the baseline incidence of spores in residential households is currently unknown. Vacuum cleaner dust from 963 households in 13 major Canadian cities was tested for using a novel real-time PCR assay directed against all known subtypes of the botulinum neurotoxin gene. None of the samples tested positive for Analysis of a random subset of samples by MALDI Biotyper revealed that the most common anaerobic bacterial isolates were of the genus and the most common species recovered overall was Dust that was spiked with spores of each toxin type successfully produced positive real-time PCR reactions. These control experiments indicate that this is a viable method for the detection of spores in household dust. We make several recommendations for future work that may help discover a common environmental source of spores that could lead to effective preventative measures for this rare but deadly childhood disease.