Outbreak of Food Poisoning Caused by Bacillus cereus

Abstract

1) and other Euro- pean investigators (f, 3) have established Bacalus cereus as an etiological agent of food poisoning outbreaks for over a decade, there have been few well-documented reports of the association of B. cereus with food poisoning in the United States (4,6).B. cereus causes a form of food poisoning characterized by diarrhea, abdominal pain, and nausea with little or no vomiting.Symptoms usually occur 8-16 hours after ingestion of the contaminated food.Hauge (1) found B. cereus to be the etiological agent in eight instances of food poisoning involving foods such as vanilla sauce, cream sauce with egg, instant meat gravy prepared from a powder, and meat preserved in gravy.Experimentally, he was able to reproduce the symptoms in himself and in four of six volun- teers, each of whom had consumed 155-270 ml. of vanilla sauce containing 30-60 million B. cereu per ml.The mechanism responsible for inducing the disease has not been conclusively demonstrated.In common with outbreaks caused by Clostridium per/ringens, those caused by B. cereuqs appear to require millions of living bacteria per gram of food to cause symptoms (1,6).