Contaminação microbiológica em amostras de chás comerciais

Abstract

The use of medicinal plants in their derivatives as teas, aiming at the prevention or treatment of illnesses, is one of the oldest practices in society, which grows nowadays by the search for alternative treatments or even by ancestral belief. Herbal medicines constitute a large productive chain, from their production to their sale to the consumer, and in this production process, which involves numerous phases, the quality of the product is of paramount importance when it comes to consumables. In order to determine the microbiological quality of these medicinal plants, the samples were taken to the laboratory for analysis to verify the incidence of fungi and their subsequent identification. Six different types of teas, of different brands, were analyzed, where the total of 59.1% of the fragments evaluated showed the development of fungal structures, of this value, 75.4% were of the genus Rhizopus sp., 22.5% Aspergillus sp and 2.1% representing Penicillium sp.