Prevalence and level of Listeria monocytogenes in ready-to-eat foods in Sweden 2010

An overview of Listeria monocytogenes contamination in ready to eat meat, dairy and fishery foods

“…Most reported listeriosis outbreaks occurred in Europe, Canada, United States and, in lesser extent, in Australia and New Zealand (TODD & NOTERMANS, 2011). Although L. monocytogenes can be reported in a wide variety of food, outbreaks and sporadic cases in humans are predominantly related to the consumption of ready to eat food (OKUTANI et al, 2004;WHO/FAO, 2004;TODD & NOTERMANS, 2011;LAMBERTZ et al, 2012).…”

“…In Sweden, 2010, the National Food Agency (NFA) examined the presence of L. monocytogenes in RTE foods and detected this pathogen in 12% of fish samples, 1.2% of meat product samples and 0.4% in cheese samples (LAMBERTZ et al, 2012). In Estonian, a survey baseline conducted in 2008-2010, identified L. monocytogenes in 18.7% of raw meat and raw meat products, 2% in RTE meat products and 0.3% in RTE milk products (KRAMARENKO et al, 2013).…”

Is your lunch salad safe to eat? Occurrence of bacterial pathogens and potential for pathogen growth in pre-packed ready-to-eat mixed-ingredient salads

“…It should be noted that only 12 salads containing salmon were analysed in the Swedish study and that all of these salads contained smoked salmon, which is considered to be an important vehicle of foodborne human listeriosis [38]. For example, L. monocytogenes was detected in 12% of smoked salmon samples at retail in Sweden in 2010 [39]. …”

“…However, chicken meat is not known to be an important vehicle of foodborne human listeriosis and L. monocytogenes was detected in only 1.6% of the RTE chicken meat analysed in the EU in 2013 [38], which is no higher than the prevalence reported for other common salad ingredients. For example, L. monocytogenes has been found in 3% of RTE salads with no meat ingredient [41] and in 1% of samples of ham [39,42]. It appears that many ingredients in a mixed-ingredient salad may be contaminated, and thus the risk of contamination increases with the number of added ingredients in a mixed-ingredient salad.…”

Impact of microbial variability on food safety and quality

“…Therefore, quantitative microbiology is often used as a tool to evaluate certain food processes and designs on their effectiveness in eliminating or controlling the growth of microorganisms (Augustin et al, 2011;Coroller et al, 2012;Koutsoumanis et al, 2010;Van Lieverloo et al, 2013;. However, many variability factors are known to influence prediction, such as strain variability , process variability, or variability in the initial contamination (Awaisheh, 2010;Lambertz et al, 2012). Although, integration of these variability factors in predictive modelling, such as in stochastic or probabilistic modelling, has been applied (Koutsoumanis et al, 2010;Membré et al, 2006), quantitative knowledge on the various specific variability factors and their magnitude are also needed to prioritize their importance.…”