Risks of reducing safety of cheese-making products depending on the composition of antibiotics in milk

The study is aimed at assessing risks of reducing the safety of semi-hard and soft cheeses during processing of milk containing residual amounts of antibiotics. Using the method of model production, the effect of six classes of antibiotics on the development of starter microflora and their distribution between the cheese dough and cheese whey in the technologies of Gollandsky and Adygeysky cheeses was studied. In order to make the analysis results informative, the amount of added antibiotics significantly exceeded the level standardized in raw milk: ampicillin – 35.0 mcg/kg; tetracycline – 250.0 mcg/kg; chlortetracycline – 250.0 mcg/kg; doxytetracycline – 250.0 mcg/kg; streptomycin – 4000.0 mcg/kg; ciprofloxacin – 50.0 mcg/kg; erythromycin – 2500.0 mcg/kg; chloramphenicol – 200.0 mcg/kg. Ampicillin was found to have the most pronounced bactericidal effect, leading to critical suppression of the starter microbiome. Streptomycin, erythromycin, and tetracycline exhibit moderate inhibition, while ciprofloxacin and chloramphenicol have no significant effect on starter cultures. Analysis of the proportional distribution of antibiotics from various groups showed that most of the studied antibiotics are predominantly transferred to the whey (at a level of 85–89 %), which corresponds to the whey-cheese mass distribution. The exception is tetracycline, up to 35 % of which is transferred to the cheese mass. The type of cheese is noted to be one of the determining factors for the final antibiotic content. In Gollandsky cheese, 50–55 % of tetracycline antibiotics (tetracycline, chlortetracycline, and doxytetracycline) accumulate in the cheese dough, posing a direct threat to consumers. In Adygeysky cheese, 81–88 % of the studied antibiotics migrate into the whey, which reduces the load on the cheese but leads to by-product contamination and poses a problem for whey recycling. The experimental data obtained highlight the need to consider not only the initial concentration of antibiotics in milk, but also their nature and the process parameters of cheese production when developing cheese safety management systems.

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