**1. Introduction**

The purpose of this book is to give informative well-researched chapters to the readers, health practitioners, policy makers, food industry, researchers and all stakeholders involved in food safety and food security. The chapters in this book are from specialists in their respective disciplines. The unprecedented outbreak of listeriosis in South Africa recently from January 2017 to March 2018 [1] has made this book to be more important. This has been reported as the greatest outbreak of listeriosis in recent times because of the number of cases reported as well as the number of fatalities.

The book is about the foodborne pathogen, *Listeria monocytogenes*. The pathogen is of public health concern [2], which causes serious diseases such as endocarditis, encephalitis sepsis and meningitis, gastro-enteritis and death [3, 4]. Infected pregnant women suffer from flu-like febrile illness, and depending on the stage of pregnancy, it may lead to abortion. Listeriosis is a notifiable disease in most industrialised countries with few or no report from Africa. It became a notifiable disease recently in South Africa after the unprecedented outbreak. In countries where listeriosis is a reportable disease, the countries have come up with actions that keep surveillance of food and food-processing plants [5].

*L. monocytogenes* is a ubiquitous pathogen because it is found everywhere. It has been reported [6] that the municipal wastewater effluent was a source of listerial pathogen in the aquatic environment. Surveillance in developing countries is on assumption that the cases of listeriosis are not always reported [7] and that traditional methods used for food storage eliminate means of growth of microorganisms. The outbreak of listeriosis has been widely reported in Japan, North America and Europe [8].

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
