| dc.description.abstract | Background; Food borne diseases contribute significantly to the global burden of morbidity and mortality across the human population especially among children under the age of five years. Geographically, the greatest burden occurs in Africa, especially in low and middle income settings (kirk et al., 2015; Torgerson et al., 2014), but even in developed countries, the incidence of many foodborne infections remains unacceptably high despite ongoing food safety efforts (crim et al., 2015), with all the associated benefits of fresh fruits, they have become important vehicles in food-borne diseases. Microbial contamination of fruits has resulted into food-borne illness that annually affects about 2millions people globally. The present study aimed to assess the microbial safety of ready to eat fruits vended in selected streets of Kampala.
Methods; A cross-sectional study involving ready to eat fruits was conducted in the selected streets of Kampala where samples were collected from different fruit venders. Microbiological contamination involving the determination of total plate count, total coliform count and total E.coli count were conducted on the collected samples and the colonies were enumerated and expressed as cfu/g.
Results; The mean total plate count (TPC) was 2.14x102cfu/g in mangoes, 2.57x102 cfu/g in watermelon and 2.3x102cfu/g in pineapples, while total coliform was 2.14x102 cfu/g in mangoes, 1.6x102 cfu/g in watermelon and 6.4x101 cfu/g in pineapples while the total E coli was, 1.2x101cfu/g in mangoes, 4x100 cfu/g in watermelon and 7x100cfu/g in pineapples. The study showed that Watermelon has the highest average of microbial contamination (2.57x102cfu/g) while pineapples with the lowest average TBC (2.3X101cfu/g) in tested fruit samples.
Conclusion and recommendation; the present study indicate presence of bacteria in the selected ready to eat fruits vended in the streets of Kampala, Uganda. Further studies should be conducted to determine the susceptibility of the isolates to the common antibiotics in the market | en_US |
