Salmonella and Escherichia coli in poultry feeds cause health hazards to poultry as well as human beings. Poultry feeds get contaminated during primary production, feed mixing and animal feeding. In control and prevention of microorganism in the poultry feeds, it is important to establish the microbial safety of poultry feeds that are used to feed the poultry. Salmonella is one of the primary sources of food borne diseases worldwide. This is as a result of consuming contaminated poultry products including poultry eggs and meat. Salmonella causes diseases including gastroenteritis, typhoid fever and diarrhea. Most Salmonella serotypes are not specific to host and cause diseases in animals and humans. Resistance against chemical treatments and antibacterial drugs is common with Salmonella and Escherichia coli. Major food contamination with Salmonella and Escherichia coli occurs due to mixing of feeding ingredients with dust during food milling. Poultry feed can therefore be considered as the major transfer of Salmonella and Escherichia coli into poultry flock. The objectives of this study were to determine prevalence, assess microbial load in poultry feeds, antimicrobial resistance levels and assess resistant genes of Salmonella sp. and Escherichia coli isolated from poultry feeds from selected outlets in Ruiru Sub - County. A total of 150 poultry feed samples of different poultry feed were collected from 30 randomly selected poultry feed outlets from five sampling sites in Ruiru Sub - County. Microbial load was determined by serial dilution. Isolation of Salmonella sp. and Escherichia coli was carried out using Salmonella-Shigella, Xylose Lysine Deoxycholate and MacConkey agar and confirmed with biochemical tests. Antimicrobial susceptibility screening was done using Kirby-Bauer disc diffusion technique. The detected drug resistance isolates were confirmed by molecular screening for specific resistance genes based on the targeted antibiotic using PCR. Tukey’s HSD was used to separate the means of bacterial counts using SPSS software version 20. The bacterial load ranged from3.1x105 cfu/g to 3.0x106 cfu/g. The bacterial load was significantly different among the samples collected (p=0.0001). Out of the 150 samples of poultry feeds, 28 % were detected with Salmonella sp. and 58 % with Escherichia coli. The isolates manifested resistance to tetracycline, co-trimoxazole and ampicillin. The resistant isolates of Salmonella sp. and Escherichia coli carried dfr, strb, tem and shv genes. The study reveals high levels of bacterial load and resistant bacteria that carry antimicrobial resistant genes in poultry feeds. Therefore, hygienic handling and production of poultry feed is important to minimize bacterial contamination in poultry feed which is a health hazard to poultry and humans. Use of antimicrobial agents in poultry production should also be regulated to reduce antimicrobial resistance.

Aims and Objectives:  One of the main concerns of the food industry is microbial adhesion to food contact surfaces and consequent contamination. Stainless steel and aluminum, widely present in food industry, are frequently exposed to bacterial colonization with possible consequences on consumers’ health. We aimed to evaluate the potential bacteriostatic/bactericidal efficacy of aluminum and stainless-steel surfaces with different large-scale roughness before and after the surface coating with two different nanotechnological coatings approved for food contact.

Methods:  Fifty hundred seventy-six disks of both stainless-steel (n = 288) and aluminum (n = 288) with different roughness (0.25, 0.5 and 1 μm) were challenged with four Gram-negative (Escherichia coli ATCC 25922, Salmonella typhimurium ATCC 1402, Yersinia enterocolitica ATCC 9610 and Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27588) and four Gram-positive (Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 6538, Enterococcus faecalis ATCC 29212, Bacillus cereus ATCC 14579 and Listeria monocytogenes NCTT 10888) bacteria and underwent 3 different sanitizing treatments, e.g., UV, alcohol and a natural product named Gold lotion.

After the first challenge all disks were then coated with two different nanotechnological coatings approved for food contact according to NSF and MOCA 1935/2004 named DURALTI^® and NanoXHAM^® D, respectively, and underwent the same sanitizing treatments.

Results: As far as concerns aluminum surfaces without nanotechnological surface treatment, an overall bacteriostatic effect was observed for all strains with respect to the initial inoculum that was 10⁶ CFU/mL. Conversely, an overall bactericidal effect was observed both for Gram-negative and -positive bacteria on DURALTI^®-treated aluminum disks, regardless of roughness and sanitizing treatment. Conversely, on stainless-steel surfaces, a significant bactericidal effect was exerted by all of sanitizing treatments against all bacterial strains regardless of roughness and surface coating. The nanoXHAM^Ò D coating itself induced an overall bactericidal effect as well as in synergy with all sanitizing treatments regardless of roughness.

Conclusions: Results are innovative in terms of the great potential of the antibacterial activity of nanotechnologically treated food contact surfaces and their combination with some sanitizing agents that might be exploited in the food industry. Moreover, since most of sanitizing treatments are toxic and corrosive causing the onset of crevices able to facilitate bacterial nesting and growth, nanoXHAM^Ò D was also able to reduce bacterial adhesion, nesting and growth.

Food safety is a global health goal and the foodborne diseases take a major crisis on health. Therefore, detection of microbial pathogens in food is the solution to the prevention and recognition of problems related to health and safety. For this reason, a scrutinized literature survey has been carried out aiming to give an overview in the field of microbiology as foodborne pathogen detection. Conventional and standard bacterial detection methods such as culture and colony counting methods, immunology-based methods and polymerase chain reaction based methods, may take up to several hours or even a few days to yield an answer. Obviously, this is inadequate, and recently many researchers are focusing towards the progress of rapid methods. Although new technologies like biosensors show potential approaches, further research and development is essential before biosensors become a real and reliable choice. New bio-molecular techniques for food pathogen detection are being developed to improve the biosensor characteristics such as sensitivity and selectivity, also which is rapid, reliable, effective and suitable for in situ analysis.Our presentation not only offers an overview in the area of microbial pathogen detection but it also describes the conventional methods, analytical techniques and recent developments in food pathogen detection, identification and quantification, with an emphasis on biosensors.