Simultaneous Detection of Salmonella spp., Salmonella Enteritidis and Salmonella Typhimurium in Raw Salad Vegetables and Vegetarian Burger Patties

The health risks posed by Salmonella spp., Salmonella Enteritidis and Salmonella Typhimurium through the consumption of raw vegetables and vegetarian burger patties necessitates the needs for the optimization of analytical approach for their detection and enumeration in the raw vegetables, which served as potential vehicles for transmission of these pathogenic microorganisms. We sought to establish a rapid, economic and sensitive method to detect and determine the load of Salmonella spp., Salmonella Enteritidis and Salmonella Typhimurium using the most probable numbers (MPN) in combination with the multiplex polymerase chain reaction (MPCR). From the naturally contaminated one hundred and seventy five samples tested (n = 175), the overall prevalence of Salmonella spp. was 28%, Salmonella Enteritidis was 20% and Salmonella Typhimurium was 14.3%, respectively. The MPN-MPCR is a quantitative method to determine the density of cell concentration of Salmonella in all the samples (Salmonella spp. ranged from <3 to 53 MPN/g; S. Enteritidis ranged from <3 to 24 MPN/g; and S. Typhimurium ranged from <3 to 15 MPN/g). The combination of the MPN-MPCR is an efficient, simple, fast analytical method for the detection and enumeration of Salmonella spp., Salmonella Enteritidis and Salmonella Typhimurium in vegetables and the vegetarian burger patties since it can significantly reduce time and labour with analysis completed within 2 days, as opposed to the traditional confirmation method that can take up to 5 days for unequivocal identification of species.