Bacteriological Studies on Ready to Eat Meat

Abstract

Meat and meat products are essential in most countries due to its contribution in solving the problem of food animal shortage. Heat processing of the meat is one of the most technological method that help in improving the meat quality and decreasing the bacterial number in meat. This study threw light on safety of some street vended meat products (sausage, pasterma, luncheon, shawerma and kofta) through bacteriological investigation. Bacteriological assessment was conducted on 350 random samples of retailed meat products representing ready to eat (RTE) meat products. The examined samples included 50 of each type (beef kofta, meat shwerma, chicken shawerma, pasterma, beef luncheon, sausage and chicken luncheon) and were collected from different supermarkets. Samples were examined sensory and bacteriologically. Microbiological examination revealed that kofta showed high levels of bacterial contamination where the incidence rates of S. aureus, E. coli and Salmonella spp. were 58%, 20 % and 8 %, respectively. Also, pasterma samples were amaizingly contaminated with incidence rates of the three species of bacteria being 64%, 24 % and 24 %, respectivel. In beef shawerma, the rates of incidence of the three bacterial species were 26 %, 18 % and 8 % while in chicken shawerma the isolation rates were 20%, 12% and 6%, respectively. Sausage samples showed incidences of the bacterial species in the same order as 28%, 18 % and 6 %. In contrast, E. coli was detected in 12% of the beef luncheon samples while S. aureus and salmonellae were not isolated. The same finding was almost met with chicken luncheon where E. coli was the only detected bacteria in 14% of the samples. Kofta showed the highest level of salmonella incidence (8%) with 14% of salmonella isolates belonging to S. Typhimurium of which the polyvalent serovars O125, O78, O114 and polyvalent O55 were identified serologically.