Staphylococcal Intoxication Traced to Non-Fat Dried Milk.

A series of food poisoning outbreaks, due to the consumption of imported non-fat dried milk (NDM), occurred in Egypt during 1986. Bacteriological examination was carried out on two samples of the remaining NDM for the outbreaks, and 90 samples of the imported NDM, represented nine code numbers. All of the samples tested were free of coagulase positive staphylococci, Salmonella , Shigella , Bacillus cereus , Clostridium perfringens , and Escherichia coli , and the viable bacterial counts ranged from 7.9 × 102 to 5.0 × 104 cells/g. However, staphylococcal enterotoxins B & A (1.5 & 0.125 μg/100 samples, respectively) were detected in the NDM samples remaining from the outbreaks. At the same time, out of 27 representative samples of NDM, three samples, with the same code number, contained staphylococcal enterotoxin B (1.25 μg/100 g), and one of those three samples contained staphylococcal enterotoxin A (0.125 μg/100 g).