Salmonella enteritidis, a pathogenic micro-organism occurring in the yolk and albumen of uncooked and semi-cooked eggs, may soon be a thing of the past thanks to the local development of a new pasteurisation system that reduces the contamination risk.Tricia Fitchet reports. AN R&D consortium, under leadership of the CSIR, has developed a method of killing the Salmonella enteritidis bacteria without cooking the eggs. A world first, the project took four years of development and pooled financial support from South Africa's Innovation Fund, the skills of food scientists and microbiologists at the CSIR, sensory evaluators at the University of Pretoria, design engineers from Delphius Technologies and the commercial input of Eggbert Eggs. Although internationally some whole shell eggs are pasteurised using a US-developed water-bath method, it is an expensive and complicated process, according to Dr Gatsha Mazithulela, CSIR executive director: Biosciences.
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