Staphylococcal food poisoning (SFP) is considered one of the most common types of food-borne disease around the world. However, there is a lack of information about the true incidence even in countries having a surveillance system for SFP, as in the United States (Mead et al., 1999). These authors estimated that SFP accounted for 1.3% (185060 cases) of the total of food-borne illnesses (including those of parasitic and viral origin) in the US during the years 1983–1992. By way of comparison during the same period, an estimated 14.2% of the total of food-borne illnesses was caused by Campylobacter spp. and 9.7% by salmonellae. Buzby et al. (1996) estimated that about 1.5 million cases of SFP occurred in the US in 1993, exceeding the estimation of Mead et al. (1999) by a factor of about ten. The largest outbreak of SFP so far was reported from Japan in 2000, when more than 10 000 people felt ill after consumption of reconstituted milk. Staphylococcal enterotoxins (SE) type A and H were detected in the milk powder as well as in the milk (Ikeda et al., 2005).