THE ELIMINATION OF ENTERIC BACTERIAL PATHOGENS FROM FOOD AND FEED OF ANIMAL ORIGIN BY GAMMA IRRADIATION WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO SALMONELLA RADICIDATION¹

Abstract

Despite world‐wide severe underreporting of food‐transmitted disease of microbial origin, it is clear that the majority of such diseases is caused by enteropathogenic Enterobacteriaceae. Most of these are spread by foods of animal origin, consumed raw, or recontaminated subsequent to industrial or culinary heat processing. Radicidation with the help of gamma rays of carcasses or consumer size cuts presents a real solution to this problem. An ecologically based procedure for the estimation of the most probable effective dose for the elimination of enteric pathogens of bacterial origin from fresh meats, poultry and seafoods is described, special attention being paid to bacteriological analytical methodology found useful under conditions of practice. An additional advantage of this approach is, that it will allow easy assessment of lower doses, following reductions of initial enterobacterial loads, which should be attempted in parallel. It is demonstrated that most alleged counter‐indications so far hampering the use of ionizing radiation in food processing have now been eliminated, allowing full advantage to be derived from radicidation as an essential contribution to the protection of the consumer against diseases of microbial aetiology spread by foods, similar to the mandatory pasteurization of milk.

The destruction of Salmonella typhimurium in chicken exudate by different freeze‐thaw treatments

“…Even though acid treatment has been advocated for use in poultry processing (Mountney & O'Malley 1965), as has freezing (Gunaratne & Spencer 1974) and freezing with acid (Olson et al 1981b), the stress effect of a pre-freezing exposure to chemicals has not been previously established. The current findings, although obtained using a chicken exudate system, may nevertheless have potential for eliminating Salmonella spp.…”

“…Many investigations have sought to develop effective and suitable procedures for killing salmonellas of processed poultry. These include acid dips (Mountney & O'Malley 1965), irradiation (Idziak & Incze 1968;Mossel 1977), chlorination (Surkiewicz et al 1969;Morris & Wells 1970;Mead & Thomas 1973;Mead et al 1975), hot acid treatment (Juven et al 1974), freezing (Gunaratne & Spencer 1974), repeated freezethawing (Olson et al 1981a) and the Nurmi concept of protecting day-old chicks against salmonella colonization by establishing adult gut microflora (Pivnick & Nurmi 1982).…”

Bacteriological Quality of Freshly Processed Broiler Chickens as Affected by Carcass Pretreatment and Gamma Irradiation

“…Other studies showed that doses up to 10 kGy extended the shelf-life of chicken meat by 2 to 3 wk (Cho et al, 1985;Klinger et al, 1986). Mossel (1977) also reported that l-5 kGy irradiation doses could effectively destroy all Salmonellae on chicken carcasses. Tarkowski et al (1984) reported a reduction of 4 log numbers of Yersinia enterocolitica and Campylobacter jejuni on raw meat irradiated with up to 1.5 kGy dose.…”

Food Irradiation: Benefits and Concerns

“…However, few published studies have tested this concept. Adequate data exist on salmonellae as contaminants of fresh or frozen poultry to conclude that the limiting factors for the irradiation of this product are more organoleptic than microbiological (Mulder et al 1977;Mossel 1977). Food irradiation is appropriate for the control of Aeromanas hydrophila (Palumbo et al 1986) Cumpylobacter jejuni (Lambert and Maxcy 1984) and Lysteriu monocytogenes (Huhtanen et al 1989).…”