NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Enough E. coli bacteria to cause food poisoning can survive in dry fermented salami despite production standards that meet federal and industry food processing requirements, researchers say.
Such contamination caused a 1994 food poisoning outbreak in California and Washington, says a report in the August issue of the American Journal of Public Health.
According to researchers from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the bacteria "may have been present on raw meat that was brought into the plant and subsequently survived the fermentation and drying steps involved in salami production."
After giving the plant that produced the contaminated salami a clean bill of health, researchers collected samples of packaged pre-sliced salami produced by the facility. They found very small amounts of E. coli bacteria in one of 32 packages sampled. The strain of bacteria was found to be a match for the E. coli that caused the outbreak.
The researchers then calculated that less than 50 E. coli bacteria were probably enough to cause each of the 17 cases of food poisoning in 1994.
In their report, the authors say E. coli has emerged as a major player in human infectious disease during the past decade. They point out that the number of cases of E. coli food poisoning appears to be increasing, as is the frequency of complications from infection.
As a result of their study, the researchers are recommending that drying and fermenting methods for salami be modified to include other bacteria-killing processes such as cooking or irradiation with X-rays.
Commenting in the same journal on the recent upsurge of food-related illness, researchers from the Minnesota Department of Health call for increased public health surveillance "to detect outbreaks, identify their causes, and assess the effectiveness of [infection] control measures."
They point to this study, and to a recent salmonella outbreak linked to ice cream "premix" that was contaminated during transport in tankers previously used for raw eggs as examples of how mass production of ready-to-eat foods has great potential for causing widespread harm.
