Trimming, vacuum cleaning or hot water-vacuum cleaning effects of lamb hindsaddles

Swab samples were obtained from the hindsaddles of randomly selected lamb carcasses before and after the routine operations of trimming, vacuum cleaning unaccompanied by heating of the surface, or hot water-vacuum cleaning in a commercial carcass dressing process. For each operation, two pairs of sample sets, each pair of 25 samples collected before and 25 samples collected after the operation were obtained. The total aerobes, coliforms and Escherichia coli recovered from each sample were enumerated For each set values for the mean, standard deviation and log of the arithmetic mean were calculated on the assumption that the log values were normally distributed For any pair of total count coliform or E. coli data sets, the log means generally differed by <0.3, <0.4 or <0.5 log units, respectively. Apparently, none of the treatments had practically important effects on the microbial condition of the population of dressed carcasses.