BACKGROUND Cooking butter is one of the most popular types of fat consumed in Egyptian houses. It is produced in villages by rural women that are usually using their traditional knowledge during manufacturing. OBJECTIVE To study the rate of contamination and hygienic quality of cooking butter METHODS A total of 60 random samples of cooking butter, were collected from different farmers' hous...

In recent years, bovine colostrum has gained popularity as a human food because it is an excellent source of bioactive proteins, which have been claimed to inhibit viral and bacterial pathogens, improve gastrointestinal health, and enhance body condition. A study was conducted to determine bacteriological quality and occurrence of Salmonella in colostrum collected from dairy herds (n = 55) in P...

AIMS A rapid and simple method for enumerating uninjured and sublethally injured bacterial cells, the twofold dilution method (2FD), was developed and evaluated. METHODS AND RESULTS Following twofold serial dilution of samples in a 96 well microtiter plate, double strength selective broth or nonselective broth was added to each well. For resuscitation of heat-injured (55 degrees C for 10 min)...

The aim of the study was to evaluate the presence of pathogenic viruses in the Moselle River and to compare the usefulness of thermotolerant coliforms and somatic coliphages as tools for river water quality assessment in terms of viral contamination. Thermotolerant coliforms and somatic coliphages were enumerated by standardized methods in 170 samples of river water drawn from five sampling sit...

The aim of this study was to assess the influence of urban waste, sewage and other human centred activities on the microbiological quality of the river Subin, which flows through the metropolis of Kumasi, Ghana, and serves as drinking water for communities downstream. Three sites, Racecourse, Asafo and Asago, on the Subin were monitored over a year for total coliforms, faecal coliforms, enteroc...

Bacterial contaminants of Vhuswa--a traditional maize-based weaning food, and domestic drinking-water stored in impoverished rural households in Venda of Limpopo province, South Africa, were determined. One hundred and twenty-five samples of Vhuswa fed to children aged less than five years were assessed for Escherichia coli, Campylobacter jejuni, Salmonella, and Shigella. The microbiological qu...

The objective of this study was to evaluate the influencing factors in the occurrence of coliforms in the drinking water in La Plata (Argentina) from June 1999 to June 2001. A total of 180 samples were collected from Rio de La Plata (102 samples) and Puelche Aquifer (78 samples); 45 samples were collected for each of the four seasons. The membrane filter procedure was used for isolating bacteri...

Methods for detecting total coliform bacteria in drinking water were compared using 1,483 different drinking water samples from 15 small community water systems in Vermont and New Hampshire. The methods included the membrane filter (MF) technique, a 10-tube fermentation tube (FT) technique, and the presence-absence (P-A) test. Each technique was evaluated using a 100-ml drinking water sample. O...

The number and properties of drug-resistant coliform bacteria in hospital and city sewage were compared. There was little difference in the counts of organisms with nontransferable resistance to one or more of 13 commonly used drugs. An average of 26% of coliforms in hospital waste water had transferable resistance to at least one of the drugs ampicillin, chloramphenicol, streptomycin, sulfonam...

Recovery of total coliforms and Escherichia coli on a new membrane filtration (MF) medium was evaluated with 25 water samples from seven states. Testing of the new medium, m-ColiBlue24 broth, was conducted according to a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency protocol. For comparison, this same protocol was used to measure recovery of total coliforms and E. coli with two standard MF media, m-Endo...