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ARS Home » Northeast Area » Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania » Eastern Regional Research Center » Microbial and Chemical Food Safety » Research » Publications at this Location » Publication #320758
Title: Effect of pH, sodium chloride and sodium pyrophosphate on the termal resistance of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in ground beef

Author
item Juneja, Vijay
item CADAVEZ, VASCO - De Ciência Animal & Centro De Investigação De Montanha (CIMO)
item GONZALES-BARRONON2, URSULA - De Ciência Animal & Centro De Investigação De Montanha (CIMO)
item Mukhopadhyay, Sudarsan

Submitted to: Food Research International
Publication Type: Other
Publication Acceptance Date: 9/29/2015
Publication Date: N/A
Citation: N/A

Interpretive Summary:

Technical Abstract: Response to the Letter to the Editor: We have received with great satisfaction that our article “Modelling the effect of pH, sodium chloride and sodium pyrophosphate on the thermal resistance of Escherichia coli O157:H7 in ground beef” (Food Research International, 69:289-304; 2015) has awaken interest in another predictive microbiology research group. Henceforth, we respond to each of the queries raised by Davey and Chandrakash in their Letter to the Editor, dated May 7, 2015. (1) It was not the authors’ intention to include raw data in the manuscript. In our understanding, there is no reason for scientific papers to provide entire raw data since their purpose is to furnish analysed results, interpretations, models and conclusions to the scientific community. Likewise, we do not expect that readers would want to arrive to original data from reported tables. However, our manuscript displayed neatly the raw data points for each of the 38 environmental conditions in Figures 1-4. We acknowledge that sometimes research groups may want to avail of data produced in other laboratories for different purposes, but in such instances, raw data can always be kindly requested from the authors or else accessed through databases such as ComBase. (2) and (3) We are grateful to Davey and Chandrakash’s heat transfer approximate solution which demonstrates indeed what we stated in our manuscript, that the come-up times were lower than 30 s. (4) We did not incur in any mistake. What we stated in page 293 (i.e., treatment times ranged from 0.83 to 190 min) is in agreement with Figure 1. Figure 1, Expt cond #1 does show that the maximum time is 0.83 min. Notice that the marker is slightly to the right-hand side of x=0.8 min. (5) After presenting Equation (3) (page 293), we expressly indicated that the dependent variable log N(t) used was the logarithm base 10. Nowhere in the manuscript, we stated that the response variable was log10 N/N0 or ln N/N0. In addition, the caption of Figure 8 states that the concentration (y-axis) is in log CFU/g and the time (x-axis) in minutes.