Evaluación del funcionamiento del sistema BacT/Alert 3d para la detección de microorganismos contaminantes en productos lácteos UHT con fines de validación e implementación en una planta láctea de Cundinamarca/Colombia.

Abstract

Throughout its history, the dairy industry has faced challenges in the identification of contaminating microorganisms in its products. Due to the high demand for dairy foods today, the optimization of production processes, physical, chemical and microbiological analysis and product release is essential to ensure the stability and sustainability of a production plant; in addition, continuous improvement in the quality offered to the market not only builds consumer loyalty but also makes safety the number one tool for success and public health care. Among the biotechnological advances related to this industry we find the UHT or Ultra High Temperature treated products that promise food free of microbial contaminants, especially of pathogenic origin, without altering its nutritional characteristics and allowing its commercialization at room temperature (23° C +/-1). In order to follow up the effectiveness of these processes, protocols of commercial sterility guarantees were proposed, consisting of microbiological and physicochemical analyses in certain periods of time after the packaging of UHT products in order to prevent microbial contamination due to failures in the thermization process. Contaminating microorganisms can take days to be detected by traditional microbiological sterility tests and risk being released into the market causing a massive outbreak of food poisoning. Therefore, multinational companies committed to ensure food safety as BIOMERIEUX have developed rapid detection systems for contaminating microorganisms in UHT products by issuing an early warning for the diagnosis and detection of the loss of commercial sterility in the shortest possible time avoiding millions of dollars in losses due to claims and cancellations of products, among others. BacT/Alert 3D, marketed by the aforementioned multinational company, is a system whose main function is to capture the increase of C02 in UHT milk matrices resulting from contaminating microbial metabolism in less than 24 hours; the system offers high sensitivity in capturing the gas and issuing an EARLY ALERT when the results are positive. A verification of the efficiency of the BacT/Alert 3D system was performed in a dairy plant in Cundinamarca, Colombia where it was evidenced that the equipment satisfactorily fulfills the proposed objectives and can be implemented within the routine analysis for the detection of sterility loss.