Isolation of Bacterial Flora From Beans Cake Sold at the Commercial Area of Federal Polytechnic Damaturu, Yobe State.

Abstract

Ten (10) samples of beans cake (Kosai or Akara) were collected from the Federal Polytechnic Damaturu environment to determine the bacteriological quality, level of concentration and to isolate and identify some of the organisms present in Kosai. 0.1mls of the Akara sample which is prepared by dissolving 5.0g of the sample in 10mls of sterile distilled water. The samples were spread plated on nutrient and macConkey agar and then incubated at 37oC for 24 hours. The bacterial colonies were counted using a colony counter. The result revealed that the total microbial load range from 0.7 – 18.9X103 cfu/g and the preliminary gram staining of the colonies revealed the presences of both gram positive and negative organisms in most of the colonies. Four organisms were identified from the colonies which include; Shigella spp (17.9%), Escherichia coli (28.50/0), Salmonella spp (17.90/0) and Staphylococcus aureus (35.7%) respectively. These isolates were commonly found to be the contaminants in food and water. Sources might be through handling, packaging and production process. Staphylococcus aureus which occurs in about 35.7% of the samples that were studied calls for more proper hygiene and handling as these isolate were known to cause infection even at a very low concentration. Base on this study one can deduce that the handling process is fairly good and is evident in the low amount of bacterial count and the absence of fastidious isolate such as Pseudomonas spp and also the limited number of isolated organisms. It's therefore recommended that proper hygiene and handling process be encouraged among the sellers and buyers of beans cake in oder to limit the chances of infections caused by these microorganisms.