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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • While freezing should kill multicellular eukaryotes (worms or other parasites), bacteria are pretty hardy, even to things like freezing. Plus, even when they aren’t, they make up for it in numbers… if you kill 99% of 10 million bacteria, you still have a hundred thousand that can subsequently repopulate if they are thawed left to grow a bit (even in the fridge). I’m not sure about these Vibrio strains, but the infective dose of some E. coli and Salmonella strains is measured in quantities less than 1000 bacterial cells.

    Edit: reading a bit, probably this won’t be doing much growing at fridge temperatures (prefers warm water after all), however infections have been reported from oysters that were tested at about 900 cfu/gram of meat, so it might take (coincidentally) about a hundred thousand bacteria to cause an infection (~10g/oyster * 900 cfu/gram * 12 oysters or so). This isn’t very much… you probably have at least 1 to 100 million cfu/g of various bacteria on chopped lettuce, for instance.