Microbial risk assessment of ready-to-eat fast foods from different street-vended restaurants

Research Article

International Journal of One Health, 6(1): 41-48

https://doi.org/10.14202/IJOH.2020.41-48

Abdullah Al Momen Sabuj, Zobayda Farzana Haque, Md. Iftekhar Younus, Amrita Pondit, Nanda Barua, Md. Golzar Hossain, Md. Alimul Islam, and Sukumar Saha

Department of Microbiology and Hygiene, Faculty of Veterinary Science, Bangladesh Agricultural University, Mymensingh-2202, Bangladesh.

Background and Aim: Microbiological risk analysis of ready-to-eat fast foods for sale on the campus of Bangladesh Agricultural University was undertaken to understand the contribution of such foods to foodborne disease.

Materials and Methods: From each of 10 randomly selected fast food outlets, a total of 120 samples of six food items were collected to assess common microbial load. In parallel, vendors were asked about their food production and selling practices, while consumers (n=200) were asked about their consumption of fast foods and whether they had experienced symptoms of foodborne disease.

Results: Aerobic plate count (APC) varied from 6.92 to 7.24 log colony-forming unit (cfu)/g, Staphylococcus spp. 4.67 to 5.15 log cfu/g, Salmonella spp. 3.67 to 4.22 log cfu/g, and Escherichia coli 4.10 to 4.58 log cfu/g. Microbial risk assessment of Staphylococcus spp., Salmonella spp., and E. coli for daily, weekly, or monthly consumption was estimated by Monte Carlo simulation (10,000 iterations). The consumer survey showed 57% chance of being infected by ready-to-eat fast food samples. The calculated mean annual risks of Staphylococcus spp., Salmonella spp., and E. coli infection were about 100% in all cases.

Conclusion: Thus, the study revealed high risk of infection associated with the consumption of ready-to-eat fast foods. Keywords: fast foods, microbial quality, microbial risk, Monte Carlo simulation.

Keywords: fast foods, microbial quality, microbial risk, Monte Carlo simulation.

How to cite this article: Sabuj AAM, Haque ZF, Younus MI, Pondit A, Barua N, Hossain MG, Islam MA, Saha S (2020) Microbial risk assessment of ready-to-eat fast foods from different street-vended restaurants, Int. J. One Health, 6(1): 41-48.

Received: 05-12-2019 Accepted: 09-03-2020 Published online: 03-05-2020

Corresponding author: Sukumar Saha E-mail: sukumar.saha@bau.edu.bd

DOI: 10.14202/IJOH.2020.41-48

Copyright: Sabuj, et al. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.