To reduce the chance of contamination in that delicate fruit, a team in one University of Connecticut lab\u00a0recently processed 4,000 mangoes and water samples to test the efficacy of three disinfectants commonly used by the industry to avoid\u00a0contamination.<\/p>\n
\n“When I saw the results, I didn\u2019t believe it. So we re-ran the test ten times.” — Mary Anne Amalaradjou<\/cite><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
To the\u00a0utter surprise of researcher Mary Anne Amalaradjou, they found an unlikely candidate was\u00a0extremely effective: chlorine. \u201cWhen I saw the results, I didn\u2019t believe it. So we re-ran the test ten times,\u201d says the\u00a0assistant professor in the Department of Animal Science.<\/p>\n
Amalaradjou will\u00a0present her findings at a meeting of the National Mango Board.<\/p>\n
Salmonella is a frequent culprit for outbreaks in mangoes\u00a0because it makes its way\u00a0into the water used to wash the fruit\u00a0in processing plants. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention\u00a0Salmonella\u00a0<\/em>leads to approximately 1.2 million cases of Salmonellosis each year in the United States and around 23,000 hospitalizations and 450 deaths.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had several outbreaks of people getting sick. The worrying part was the illnesses were not from cut mangoes, these were from mangoes they bought whole,\u201d says\u00a0Amalaradjou, whose work focuses on food safety and in finding new approaches to control or prevent foodborne illnesses.<\/p>\n
In mango processing plants, the wash water is housed in gigantic tanks and once the water is contaminated, the bacteria are able to attach to the fruit\u2019s skin and then enter the fruit\u2019s pulp. Once bacteria make their way into the fruit, no amount of washing can remove them. With so many mangoes washed at once, the number of contaminated mangoes can be numerous, potentially causing\u00a0many cases of Salmonellosis.<\/p>\n
Recognizing the danger, the Center for Produce Safety and the National Mango Board funded Amalaradjou’s study. \u00a0After taking on the project, Amalaradjou traveled to a mango processing plant to see the source of the contamination, the big wash water tanks, for herself in order to learn the processes so she could adapt them to a smaller-scale laboratory set up.<\/p>\n
Amalaradjou was surprised by the results because\u00a0chlorine is not very effective in the wash step for most produce. For one reason or another, from lettuce, to tomatoes to apples, chlorine simply doesn\u2019t reliably kill\u00a0Salmonella.<\/p>\n
With mangoes, Amalaradjou found, chlorine cleaned the wash water and also helped prevent cross-contamination by cleaning the mangoes themselves.<\/p>\n
Mangoes in Mary Anne Amalardjou’s lab at UConn.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n One of the other challenges the research group had to tackle was not only effective Salmonella killing, but doing so with affordable and easily implementable measures on a large scale. Because chlorine is already used in the wash water, all that the processing plants need to do is to monitor the levels frequently to keep it at an effective concentration.<\/p>\n
After this study and processing thousands of mangos, Amalaradjou says she still loves the fruit and has plans to study other bacteria that can potentially contaminate them.<\/p>\n
\u201cListeria is another area of concern, we plan to study this next. One of the take-away lessons from this project was that not all produce will respond the same way to the same disinfectant.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A UConn lab recently processed 4,000 mangoes and water samples to test the efficacy of three disinfectants commonly used by the industry to reduce contamination. What they found surprised them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":118,"featured_media":129200,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"wds_primary_category":0,"wds_primary_series":0,"wds_primary_attribution":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2231,2076,2225,1],"tags":[],"magazine-issues":[],"coauthors":[2093],"class_list":["post-129155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health-well-being","category-research","category-uconn-storrs","category-uncategorized"],"pp_statuses_selecting_workflow":false,"pp_workflow_action":"current","pp_status_selection":"publish","acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-17 01:50:03","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129155"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":129879,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129155\/revisions\/129879"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media\/129200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129155"},{"taxonomy":"magazine-issue","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/magazine-issues?post=129155"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-rest\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=129155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Mangoes](\"https:\/\/today.uconn.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/09\/IMG_5684-300x200.jpg\")