Incidence of some anaerobic bacteria isolated from chicken meat products with special reference to Clostridium perfringens

Abstract

Anaerobic spore formers, especially Clostridium perfringens, represent one of the most prevalent bacterial food poisoning outbreaks which mostly related to consumption of contaminated meat and meat products, therefore, a total of 125 random raw and half cooked chicken meat samples represented by (breast, thigh, nuggets, panee and frankfurter “25 of each”) were collected from various retail stores and supermarkets in Qualyubia governorate. Results illustrated that, raw thigh samples were the most contaminated with anaerobic bacterial counts in incidence of 84%. The identified strains were C. perfringens, C. sporogenes, C. bifermenants, C. butyricum and C. sordelli in 21.6, 16, 8, 3.2 and 3.2%, respectively. Regarding to the incidence of vegetative and spore of C. perfringens were 24, 32, 20, 16, 16% and 16, 20, 16, 8, 8% in examined raw breast, raw thigh, nuggets, panee and frankfurter, respectively. 33.3% of isolates were lecithinase positive strains and typed as C. perfringens type A (6.4%), type D (0.8%); in absence of neither type B nor D. Experimental heat resistant C. perfringens spores were six heat resistant strains; where all isolates were of type A. The high incidence of these food poisoning microorganisms in chicken meat may indicate defects in sanitary conditions and handling in processing plant.