Elaboration of microbiological guidelines as an element of codes of hygienic practices for small and/or less developed businesses to verify compliance with hazard analysis critical control point.

Effective assurance of microbiological food safety practices in small and/or less developed businesses is not yet resolved. Although a start has been made by drafting hygiene codes, feasible methods for verifying manufacturing processes that rely on strict and meaningful criteria to be applied to process points are still lacking. This investigation is a model study with various types of ready-to-eat foods aimed at verifying adequate processing for safety and subsequent meticulous hygienic handling and safe storage of foods in small and/or less developed businesses by the use of quantitative methods for selected indicator organisms, as standardized by the International Organization for Standardization. The manufacture of the foods that were used in this study invariably included (i) a heat processing step that ensured a level of lethality of nonsporing organisms at least equivalent to the reduction of such organisms attained in the pasteurization of milk and (ii) effective means of prevention of postprocess recontamination and recolorization. The results of this study indicate that simple microbiological criteria used for this purpose, including aerobic mesophilic colony (standard plate) counts, Enterobacteriaceae counts, and, in some instances, enumeration of yeast propagules, allow adequate verification of good practices throughout. This verification through monitoring of samples taken during processing in small and/or less developed businesses was found to be an attractive alternative to the conventional examination of end products.

Influence of Carbon Source, Bile Salts and Incubation Temperature on Recovery of Enterobacteriaceae from Foods Using MacConkey-type Agars.

The plea made many years ago (27) to replace the ill-defined coli-aerogenes ('coliform') bacteria as indicator organisms in foods processed for safety with the Enterobacteriaceae which are taxonomically accurately defined and as a rule more abundant has of late been more generally accepted. This called for development of a rigorously standardized formula for violet red bile glucose agar and for assessment of the optimal incubation temperature. Four reference strains of Enterobacteriaceae . 120 samples of minced meat and 100 samples of frozen broiler chickens were used in these studies. Considerable differences in the performance of commercially available dried formulae, when used as poured plates were observed. These applied both to productivity and to the type of colony produced by a given pure culture. As expected, replacement of lactose plus glucose by an equimolar amount of glucose did not influence the performance of the medium. Intrinsic toxicity of some batches of medium to non-stressed Enterobacteriaceae appeared to be mainly responsible for substandard performance. It could be overcome by careful selection of the preparations of crystal violet and particularly the bile salts (39) used in the formulae. Incubation at 30 C led to higher confirmed colony counts in minced meat than at 37 C. However, incubation temperature did not greatly influence similar counts in broiler drip. This observation could be substantiated by identification of the types of Enterobacteriaceae isolated from the two commodities. Psychrotrophic species predominated in minced meats, which are often made from raw materials stored for some time under refrigeration, whereas mesophilic species were in the majority on frozen broilers, which are generally frozen shortly after slaughter.

De bacteriologische gesteldheid van gedroogde en gezouten vis uit Paramaribo / The bacteriological condition of dried and salted fish from Paramaribo

In 1969 an examination was done to determine the bacteriological condition of dried and salted fish from Paramaribo. The samples were taken at the central market in Paramaribo and examined in the Netherlands. Six samples of smoked fish contained inadmissible bacterial growth. Six samples of dried and dried salted fish showed an admissible bacteriological condition. At some points improvement appeared to be possible and advisable