John Cerveny Industry Consultant

Publish Date: June 3, 2006

In 1994, an outbreak of E. coli O157:H7 infection was linked to dry, fermented, pork and beef salami. In response to this first implication of a dry fermented sausage product, the United States Department of Agriculture/ Food Safety Inspection Service developed guidelines requiring sausage manufacturers to validate that their processes achieve a five-log reduction of E. coli O157:H7. Various validation studies have shown that E. coli O157:H7 is able to survive in sausages that are fermented and then dried to various moistureto- protein ratios of 2.3, 1.9, or 1.6:1. Additional thermal processing methods or longer fermentation processes were utilized to achieve 5-log reductions (Getty et al. 2000).