Detection of salmonella sp. in meat and meat products - Experiences with DIASALM agar compared to modified-semisolid-rappaport-vassiliadis agar

DIASALM agar is a semisolid selective-differential medium for the detection of salmonellae. The medium consists of a motility feature (similar to MSRV ) and a differential system of sugar (sucrose and lactose) fermentation and H2S formation. The usefulness of the medium was compared with MSRV medium in 167 samples of a variety of meat and meat products. By using DIASALM and MRSV, salmonellae were recovered from 27% of the samples. The agreement be tween DIASALM and MSRV was 100%. The addition of Novobiocine to DIASALM (fa ctory recommendation : 20 mg/l) was found useful. Unlike MSRV, the H2S dete ction system embedded in DIASALM also allows for detecting non-motile salmo nellae.