Detection of Salmonella in foods using Tecra Salmonella VIA and Tecra Salmonella UNIQUE rapid immunoassays and a cultural procedure.

The presence of Salmonella in 200 raw food samples of animal origin was investigated by means of the rapid immunoassays Tecra Salmonella VIA and Tecra Salmonella UNIQUE (Tecra Diagnostics, Rosewille, New South Wales, Australia) and a cultural procedure. Forty-five samples (22.5%) were Salmonella positive by at least one of the three methods. The number of positive samples according to the analytical method was 34 (75.6%) for the cultural procedure, 29 (64.4%) for Tecra Salmonella VIA, and 27 (60.0%) for Tecra Salmonella UNIQUE. Tecra Salmonella UNIQUE detected three positive samples that were not detected by the two other methods. The cultural method also detected three positive samples that both rapid methods were unable to detect. McNemar's chi-square tests indicated that the differences between results given by the rapid immunoassays when compared with those of the cultural method were not significant (P > 0.05).