Bacterial isolates from indigenous weaning foods in rural Ethiopian setting, Jimma Zone, south west Ethiopia.

A community based bacteriological study of weaning foods was conducted from November 1994 to August 1995 in six peasant associations, Jimma Zone. The households in the study community were found to be in poor sanitary conditions with cattle and pets living in the same room with humans, and the community gets water from unprotected sources. The predominant weaning foods in the study community were cereals. These and other foods given to weaning age children were found to be grossly contaminated, aerobic mesophilic bacterial counts being 10(5) cfu/ml of sample. The most frequent bacterial isolates were Enterobacter sp, Gram positive cocci including Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella sp., Citrobacter sp., and Escherichia coli in that order. Various factors such as unsafe water, unhygienic handling of food, storage of food at ambient temperature for a long time, poor domestic and personal hygiene may have contributed for the gross contamination of weaning foods in the study community. This calls for educating the community on the relationship between contamination of weaning foods and diarrhoeal diseases, and promoting measures such as reheating of weaning foods which have been kept at ambient temperature for a long time before serving infants and children.