Evaluation of two enrichment broths, three plating media and ELISA technique for the isolation of salmonella from dairy products.

Salmonella is one of the most important food-borne pathogens that can be transmitted through the consumption of contaminated milk and milk products. Early detection of Salmonella in food is important for food safety. Two selective media, brilliant green agar (BGA) and xylose lysine desoxycholate (XLD) agar are commonly used in diagnostic laboratories for the isolation of Salmonella, often after enrichment of the samples in a broth before plating on the solid medium. Recently, a new medium called CHROmagar Salmonella (CAS) has become available for the rapid detection of Salmonella. In the present study, we compared this new medium with BGA and XLD for the isolation of Salmonella from 160 dairy products samples (80 ice cream and 80 kariesh cheese samples) with enrichment in Rappaport- Vassiliadis (RV) and tetrathionate (TT) broth. TECRA Unique Salmonella ELISA test was used. Only one sample was positive for Salmonella, which appeared on each of CAS and XLD agars, after enrichment using RV but not TT. This was associated with a sensitivity and specificity of (100 %, 92.45%), (100%, 93.71%) and (0 %, 100%) for each of CHROmagar Salmonella, XLD and BGA respectively. TECRA Unique Salmonella test yielded the highest sensitivity and specificity among all used methods; it had 100% sensitivity with 100% specificity.