[SentraSE-R]

Customer pulls egg or tuna sandwich from refrigerated case in gas station/convenience store, forgets his wallet. Puts sandwich on shelf with his bag of chips to go to car to get his wallet. Kids and wife distract him. He drives away. 24 hours later, store clerk discovers unrefrigerated egg sandwich and tosses it in dumpster with outdated sandwiches for the day. When you go through the dumpster, how do you know which sandwich has the 5 million Salmonella bacteria/gram, or the preformed Staphylococcus enterotoxin? All will pass the intact packaging, visual, and smell tests.

Let's see. Start with 10 bacteria/gram. Fifteen minutes later, there are 20/gram. After an hour, 80/gram. Two hours later, that's 80-160-320 - 640/gram. Three hours, 10240/gram. Four hours, 163,840/gram. My guess of five million/gram appears to be very low. since we passed that at 5-1/4 hours. Well, maybe you'd smell a difference after 24 hours. But maybe you wouldn't, and maybe the clerk discovered the sandwich after 8 hours. The bacterial population could be Staphylococcus aureus, and it could have peaked and crashed odorlessly, after producing the enterotoxins that will make you very sick, very fast.