The occurrence of Salmonella in raw and ready-to-eat bean-sprouts and sprouted-seeds on retail sale in England and Northern Ireland

A total of 554 samples of bean sprouts or other sprouted-seeds were collected at retail sale and submitted to 9 Official Control Laboratories in England and Northern Ireland during January to March 2011. Samples (100g) were tested for the presence of Salmonella using the EN ISO 6579:2002 method. Products labelled as ready-to-eat comprised 23% of the samples and 61% were labelled as raw or to-cook: for the remaining 12% had no indication if the food was intended as ready-to-eat or ready-to-cook, and 4% were not recorded. Salmonella spp. were detected from 4 samples of mung-bean sprouts (0.7% of all the 554 samples) and all four isolates were confirmed as Salmonella enterica serovar Abaetetuba (11:k:1,5). Two of the samples where Salmonella was detected were sold as ready-to-eat (labelled ‘rinse and serve’ only): The remaining two were from samples labelled as ready-to-cook. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. Letters in Applied Microbiology, n/a-n/a. JOUR. http://doi.org/10.1111/lam.12530