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An assessment of commercial ice across four manufacturing factories in Ogbomoso, Nigeria, reveals widespread bacterial contamination in ice used to chill fish and drinks. All forty collected samples carried bacterial loads between 1.88 and 3.20 times 10 to the power of 4 colony-forming units per millilitre, significantly exceeding recommended thresholds of under 500 units for plants and under 1,000 units for retail. Identified species included Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Streptococcus pyogenes, and Staphylococcus epidermidis, alongside Bacillus and other species. Testing demonstrated extensive antibiotic resistance, ranging from 50 to 87.5 percent, with strains resisting between four and seven drugs. Complete resistance occurred against ampicillin, cotrimoxazole, cefotaxine, and cephalexin, whilst gentamicin retained full effectiveness. These findings indicate that commercially prepared ice functions as an active transmission route for multidrug-resistant bacteria, highlighting the need for national regulatory production guidelines.
Ice is routinely used to cool drinks and preserve food, but contaminated supplies can spread resistant pathogens directly to consumers. Because the bacterial strains identified in this research resist several standard antibiotics, infections contracted through contaminated ice present serious treatment challenges. Establishing and enforcing regulatory manufacturing guidelines is essential to prevent commercial ice from serving as a widespread transmission route for drug-resistant bacteria.
The abstract highlights a compliance and sanitation challenge rather than a direct commercial technology. The findings identify an application space for industrial water treatment, sterilisation systems, and microbiological testing kits for ice factories and food retailers. The research itself is purely observational, meaning any commercial uptake by equipment suppliers, auditing services, or food safety bodies would require developing and validating appropriate intervention and hygiene control programmes.
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The microbiological safety of commercial ice used to refrigerate drinks and fish was evaluated using 40 ice samples collected from four ice manufacturing factories in Ogbomoso, Nigeria. All the samples were contaminated by bacteria and the microbial load ranged from 1.88 to 3.20 × 10 4 cfu/ml which is largely above the recommended loads of <500 and <1000 cfu/ml for ice obtained from manufacturing plants and retail outlets, respectively. The bacterial isolates obtained from the ice samples include Pediococcus cerevisiae, Bacillus subtilis, Streptococcus pyogenes, Bacillus firmus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Streptococcus equi, Staphylococcus epidermidis, and Micrococcus luteus. The degree of resistance shown by the isolates to the antibiotics differs ranging from 50-87.5%, with multiple-drug resistance to 4-7 antibiotics. The isolates showed 100% resistance to Cotrimoxazole, Ampicillin, Cefotaxine and Cephalexin, while none of them was resistant to Gentamicin. The resistance to other antibiotics ranged from 26.67% for Ofloxacin, 66.67% for Erythromycin to 86.67% for Tetracycline. The present study reveals that ice may represent novel route of spread of antibiotic– resistant bacteria especially in developing countries. In view of the results herein reported, it is highly recommended that national regulatory guidelines should be established for the production of ice.
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