Journal of Food Processing & Technology

Survival of Staphylococcus aureus in herbs

4^th International Conference and Exhibition on Food Processing & Technology

August 10-12, 2015 London, UK

Mai Dinh Thanh, Hendrik Frentzel, Alexandra Fetsch, Anneluise Mader and Bernd Appel

Posters-Accepted Abstracts: J Food Process Technol

Abstract:

Herbs are of specific relevance in context of food safety. Natural condiments can be contaminated with microorganisms, among
them pathogenic species like Salmonella, Bacillus cereus, but also Staphylococcus aureus. Herbs are added to various foods
including ready-to-eat products. Thus, consumers can be directly exposed to contaminated herbs. Staphylococcus spp. is gram-positive
non-spore formers which possess strain variability in the resistance to desiccation. The survival of an enterotoxin A producing food
borne incident S. aureus strain (BfR-ST345) was investigated in dried and grounded culinary herbs (Ocimumbasilicum, Petroselinum
crispum, Origanumvulgare) in three repetitions. The inoculum was prepared by adding a fluid bacteria culture on 0.5 g sand as carrier
followed by air drying (18±2 hour), homogenization and addition to 4.5 g of herb matrix or sand (positive control) in triplicates (108
cfu/g final matrix). Plate count according to ISO 6888-1 was conducted weekly over a period of 10 weeks including the day of spiking.
The detection limit was 1 log10 cfu/g. Statistics was conducted using IBM SPSS Statistics 21. In this study S. aureus was reduced for
0.67±0.15 log10/week in average. Herbs have shown that they can have an impact on the survival of bacteria. Nevertheless, these
differences could not be allocated by statistical analyses over the whole period. In conclusion, contaminations of herbs with S. aureus
are possible. Nevertheless, survival in dry environments is limited. Due to the long storability of dried herbs, microorganisms with
higher survival capacity are of more importance in context of risk oriented food safety issues.

Biography :

Mai Dinh Thanh is from Federal Institute for Risk Assessment, Germany