Vet World Vol.15 January-2022 Article-20
Research Article
Veterinary World, 15(1): 162-167
https://doi.org/10.14202/vetworld.2022.162-167
Survivability of Clostridioides difficile spores in fermented pork summer sausage during refrigerated storage
2. Department of Agriculture, USDA Agricultural Research Service, Beltsville, Maryland 20705, United States.
3. Department of Animal Science, University of Connecticut, College of Agriculture Health and Natural Resources, Mansfield 06269, Connecticut, United States.
Background and Aim: Clostridioides difficile is a spore-forming pathogen that causes serious enteric disease in humans. Strains have been isolated from food animals and meat, including pork, which suggest a potential for foodborne transmission. Pork summer sausage is a popular fermented meat product, which is consumed cooked or cooked to a lower internal temperature due to acidification of the product. The effect of acidity and cooking on the viability of C. difficile spores in a fermented meat product has not been determined. Therefore, the aim was to study the survivability of C. difficile spores in fermented pork summer sausage.
Materials and Methods: Fermented pork sausages were prepared according to a commercial recipe with or without starter culture and C. difficile spores followed by fermentation at 37°C for ∼12 h under 85% relative humidity until pH 5.0 was reached and further processed as cooked (>57°C) or uncooked (≤57°C) and stored at 4°C. C. difficile spores in sausages were enumerated at 1 h following inoculation and on days 0, 1, 7, 14, 21, 30, 60, and 90 of storage.
Results: It was observed that C. difficile spore viability in control unfermented treatment was significantly different on day 0 from the fermented, fermented cooked, and control unfermented cooked treatments (p<0.05); however, there was no significant difference among the latter three treatment groups throughout 90 days of storage (p>0.05). On day 90 of storage, the unfermented control sausages yielded ∼4.0 log colony-forming unit (CFU)/g of C. difficile spores compared to ∼3.5 log CFU/g recovered from fermented samples and the unfermented cooked control samples identifying spore viability in all treatment groups.
Conclusion: C. difficile spores were found to survive the acidity and cooking of fermented pork summer sausage and storage at 4°C for 3 months, thereby highlighting the need for effective intervention strategies to reduce the risk of C. difficile contamination in pork products. Keywords: acidity, Clostridioides difficile, fermented pork sausage, spores.
Keywords: acidity, Clostridioides difficile, fermented pork sausage, spores.
How to cite this article: Flock G, Yin H, Chen C, Pellissery AJ, Venkitanarayanan K (2022) Survivability of Clostridioides difficile spores in fermented pork summer sausage during refrigerated storage, Veterinary World, 15(1): 162-167.
Received: 23-08-2021 Accepted: 23-12-2021 Published online: 27-01-2022
Corresponding author: E-mail: kumar.venkitanarayanan@uconn.edu
DOI: 10.14202/vetworld.2022.162-167
Copyright: Flock, 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.