Agriculture Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Meat inspection protocols
Ever since mankind has realised that food could make
him sick, there has been meat inspection protocols. The
topics of
Leviticus
(Chapter 11) and
Deuteronomy
(Chapter 14), common to Judaism, Christianity and
Islam, list animals that are clean, that is, fit to eat: the ox,
the sheep, the goat, the buck, the gazelle, the roebuck, the
wild goat, the deer and the antelopes and all clean birds.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe,
beginning in Italy, the butchers' guilds were established
which set and enforced sanitary standards, encompass-
ing butchery skills and 'tidiness' (Fig. 9.1).
During the second half of the nineteenth century,
the traditional slaughter of animals throughout the
growing industrialised cities led to an increasing sani-
tary problem. The 'city fathers' acted, bringing in rules
which had the result of centralising slaughter into
municipal slaughterhouses permitting for the first time
rules of meat inspection based upon the growing
understanding of zoonotic parasites and infectious dis-
ease, particularly tuberculosis (TB), to be implemented.
These emerging rules were brought together and pub-
lished in Berlin in 1890 by Robert von Ostertag, trans-
lated into English in 1906.
In the United States, the first Federal Meat Inspection
Act was introduced in the 1890s with the objective of
maintaining exports of meat into Europe. However,
the legislation did little to improve overall standards,
and in 1906, a novel by Upton Sinclair,
The Jungle
,
which described the unsanitary conditions in US
slaughterhouses, galvanised public opinion for change.
Despite opposition from the slaughter industry, a
government investigation followed, the Neill-Reynolds
report, which led to a new Meat Inspection Act making
ante-mortem, post-mortem inspection and hygienic
processing mandatory.
The case for change
It is beyond dispute that the inspection procedures which
have served the meat industry since they were first intro-
duced in the late nineteenth century are in need of a
radical overhaul. The necessity for change has been
championed by recognised authorities in meat hygiene
worldwide over the last 35 years: Blackmore (1983),
Hathaway
et al.
(1987), Hathaway
et al
(1989), Berends
et
al.
(1993), Johnston (1994) and many others. It is widely
agreed that, even when carried out conscientiously,
traditional post-mortem inspection techniques are inef-
fective even in detecting the macroscopic lesions they
are designed to identify. McCool (1979) and Heath
et al.
(1985) reported that <20% of
Cysticercus bovis
and only
41% of
Cysticercus ovis
, respectively, were detected by
online inspection. A Dutch research project 'Integrated
quality control approach, carried out over 20 years ago,
showed that only 50% of the abnormalities present were
detected either by 'traditional post-mortem meat inspec-
tion or by visual inspection and palpation only' (Berends
et al.
1993). Hathaway
et al.
(1987) and Blackmore (1983)
suggested that
incision of the lymph nodes
, especially
the mesenterics, may result in the cross-contamination
of other carcases and organs with
Salmonella
or
Campylobacter
via the inspector's knife. An assessment
carried out on the routine examination of some of the
regional lymph nodes of the viscera in lambs in New
Zealand (Hathaway and Pullen, 1990) indicated that
examination of these nodes added nothing to inspection
of the primary organs.
Using a quantitative risk assessment approach,
Mousing
et al.
(1997) determined the consequences of a
change from traditional meat inspection procedures
(which included manual handling, palpation and
