Comparison of four Salmonella isolation techniques in four different inoculated matrices

The poultry industry is now operating under increased regulatory pressure following the introduction of the pathogen reduction and hazard analysis critical control point (HACCP) rule in 1996. This new operation scheme has greatly increased the need for on-farm food safety risk management of foodborne bacteria, such as Salmonella. Information needed to make informed food safety risk management decisions must be obtained from accurate risk assessments, which rely on the sensitivity of the isolation techniques used to identify Salmonella in the production environment. Therefore, better characterization of the Salmonella isolation and identification techniques is warranted. One new technique, immunomagnetic separation (IMS), may offer a benefit to the poultry industry, as it has been shown to be efficacious in the isolation of Salmonella from various sample matrices, including some poultry products. In this work, we compared the isolation ability of 4 Salmonella-specific protocols: IMS, tetrathionate (TT) broth, Rappaport-Vassiliadis R10 (RV) broth, and a secondary enrichment (TR) procedure. All 4 methods were compared in 4 different spiked sample matrices: Butterfield's, poultry litter, broiler crops, and carcass rinses. IMS was able to detect Salmonella at 3.66, 2.09, 3.06, and 3.97 log10 cfu/mL in Butterfield's, poultry litter, carcass rinse, and broiler crop matrices, respectively. For the broiler litter and Butterfield's solution, there were no (P > 0.05) differences among the 4 isolation protocols. However, in the carcass rinse and crop samples, there were no differences among the isolation of Salmonella using RV, TR, or TT, but all 3 were (P < or = 0.05) more successful at recovering Salmonella than the IMS method.