ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Various types of cooked food samples were collected from six different hospitals within the city of Dhaka and they were analyzed for the presence (if any) of total aerobic count (TAC), total coliform count (TCC) and total staphylococcal count (TSA) in order to determine the levels of contamination and to relate these findings to the hygiene practice of the food handlers. According to Gulf standard for microbiological criteria for foodstuff, all of the food samples exceeded the acceptable total aerobic count limit of 5 x 105 cfu/g while 4 out of 6 samples exceeded coliform count limit of 1x102 cfu/g. The total coliform counts were found to be the highest in the fish (1.6 x 107 cfu/g) and egg (2.2 x 106 cfu/g) curry samples of hospital 1 and hospital 4, respectively and were the lowest in the fish curry (2 x103 cfu/g) of hospital 4. Staphylococcus aureus was found in all of the food samples with the highest occurrence (too numerous to count) in Dal and Rice samples from hospitals 3 and 6, respectively. On Xylose Lysine Deoxycholate (XLD) agar, no black centered colony but many colorless colonies were found which primarily indicated the absence of Salmonella spp. in those samples. In order to identify pathogenic microorganisms from food samples, a series of conventional biochemical tests were performed with 23 randomly selected isolates from MacConkey, XLD, MSA agar plates. The isolates were presumptively identified as Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, Shigella spp. and Pseudomonas spp. etc. The antibiotic susceptibility test wa