Assessment of the Hygienic Condition of Chicken Shops in Alexandria and its Impact on the Bacteriological Quality of the Sold Carcasses

Abstract

Assessment of the hygienic condition of 15 chicken shops in Alexandria revealed that carcass handling had the highest mean score percentages in all zones ranging from 69.7% to 83.3% but unfortunately personal hygiene was given the lowest score percentages ranging from 34.5% to 46.9%. Moreover, there were no significant differences among different zones concerning the mean score percentages of different sanitation checklist parameters. Bacteriological analysis of 198 samples; 135 chicken carcass's washes, 45 scalding water samples and 18 defeathering machine washes revealed that washes collected after defeathering had the worst bacteriological profile regarding the counts of aerobic mesophiles (3.7×10 7 CFU/100 ml) and coliforms (8.0×10 4 MPN/100 ml). Carcass washes collected after evisceration and washing from most zones were contaminated with lower bacterial loads than either after scalding or defeathering, but they showed higher contamination with coagulase positive staphylococci Within the same zone, the defeathering machine washes were usually of worse bacteriological quality than scalding water.