Little is known about E. coli O157:H7 in foods in
the study area, thus we initiate this study to establish
procedure for detecting and epidemiological tracking
of this organism, which will be useful in a national
monitoring program. In this study, we use the immunomagnetic
separation technique in combination
with PCR assay using specific primers targeting the
SLT-I, SLT-II and the H7 genes for confirmation of
E. coli O157:H7 isolated from beef samples. The
strains isolated were characterized by their antibiotic
resistance, plasmid profiling, randomly amplified
polymorphic DNA ŽRAPD. analysis and pulsed-field
gel electrophoresis ŽPFGE..