ables 1, ,22 and and33 show the chemical, microbial and physical characteristics of both types of fish sausage. The bacterial loads on DFS and CFS were lower than the log 5 cfu/g recommended level for good quality products (ICMSF 1986), indicating good microbial quality of fresh fish sausages of both types. This could be attributed to the quality of the raw fish, hygienic processing conditions and effect of the spice-sucrose recipe. In particular the antimicrobial activity of the spices may have played a role. Some spices such as garlic were found to kill 93% of Staphylococcus epidermidis and Salmonella Typhi within 3 h of incubation (Arora and Kaur 1999). Many spices show antimicrobial activity even at very low concentrations. For instance, the minimum inhibitory concentration of garlic was found to be 6–10 mg/ml for some bacteria such as S. aureus (Benkeblia 2004).