ABSTRACT
Vegetables are frequent ingredients of cooked chilled foods and are frequently contaminated with spore-forming bacteria (SFB). Therefore, risk assessment studies have been carried out, including the following: hazard identification and characterisation--from an extensive literature review and expertise of the participants, B. cereus and C. botulinum were identified as the main hazards; exposure assessment--consisting of determination of the prevalence of hazardous SFB in cooked chilled foods containing vegetables and in unprocessed vegetables, and identification of SFB representative of the bacterial community in cooked chilled foods containing vegetables, determination of heat-resistance parameters and factors affecting heat resistance of SFB, determination of the growth kinetics of SFB in vegetable substrate and of the influence of controlling factors, validation of previous work in complex food systems and by challenge testing and information about process and storage conditions of cooked chilled foods containing vegetables. The paper illustrates some original results obtained in the course of the project. The results and information collected from scientific literature or from the expertise of the participants are integrated into the microbial risk assessment, using both a Bayesian belief network approach and a process risk model approach, previously applied to other foodborne hazards.
Subject(s)
Bacillus cereus/physiology , Clostridium botulinum/physiology , Food Microbiology , Foodborne Diseases/prevention & control , Vegetables/microbiology , Bacillus cereus/growth & development , Bacillus cereus/isolation & purification , Bayes Theorem , Clostridium botulinum/growth & development , Clostridium botulinum/isolation & purification , Cold Temperature , Environmental Exposure , Food Handling/methods , Food Handling/standards , Food Preservation/methods , Food Preservation/standards , Hot Temperature , Humans , Models, Biological , Monte Carlo Method , Risk Assessment/methods , Risk Factors , Spores, Bacterial/growth & development , Spores, Bacterial/isolation & purification , Spores, Bacterial/physiology , Time FactorsABSTRACT
EMLA cream is an acronym for eutectic mixture of local anesthetics. It contains lidocaine and prilocaine creams. A eutectic preparation, applied topically, penetrates into the dermis after an application period of 1 to 2 hours. This case report describes the successful treatment with EMLA cream of post-herpetic neuralgia, which was resistant to other modes of therapy, and briefly discusses the pharmacology of EMLA cream.
