Strengths and weaknesses of meat inspection as a contribution to animal health and welfare surveillance

Meat inspection (MI) is one of the most widely implemented and longest running systems of surveillance. It was primarily introduced to identify meat of animals that is not fit for human consumption. Additionally, MI was progressively recognised as a suitable source of data collection and for monitor...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Food control 2014-05, Vol.39, p.154-162
Main Authors: Stärk, K.D.C., Alonso, S., Dadios, N., Dupuy, C., Ellerbroek, L., Georgiev, M., Hardstaff, J., Huneau-Salaün, A., Laugier, C., Mateus, A., Nigsch, A., Afonso, A., Lindberg, A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animal welfare
Biological and medical sciences
Disease control programmes
Disease surveillance
Food industries
Food safety
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
General aspects
Hygiene and safety
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Summary:Meat inspection (MI) is one of the most widely implemented and longest running systems of surveillance. It was primarily introduced to identify meat of animals that is not fit for human consumption. Additionally, MI was progressively recognised as a suitable source of data collection and for monitoring a broad spectrum of diseases and conditions concerning animal health and welfare. For Europe, MI tasks are regulated at the European rather than country level and include a set of activities before and after stunning (ante and post mortem inspection) involving visual inspection, palpation and incisions. Over the last decade, the current MI protocol has been challenged because of its low sensitivity for important public health hazards. We aimed to assess the strengths and weaknesses of current MI protocols with primary focus on its utility in the context of animal health – including both notifiable and production diseases – and welfare, i.e. its capacity to detect cases with an aim to quantify the frequency of animal disease and welfare cases. The consequences of an alternative inspection protocol using visual-only inspection were also explored. As a first step, a review of grey and published literature was conducted for a selected number of diseases and welfare conditions in seven species or species groups: swine, poultry, bovines, small ruminants, solipeds and farmed game, represented by red deer, wild boar, rabbits and ostriches. This review highlighted a substantial lack of suitable and accessible published data on the frequency of occurrence of many diseases and conditions affecting food animals in Europe. Additionally, there were very limited data on the detection performance of MI, particularly in relation to specific degrees of severity of clinical signs. Due to the data gaps, a large proportion of input data used in this work was based on expert opinion and general biologic manifestations of the conditions investigated. The probability of case detection was quantified using a scenario tree modelling approach, taking into account the frequency of case presentation and inspection coverage. In general, the performance of MI was highly correlated with the presence of clinical and/or pathological signs in affected animals. Early or subclinical cases were likely to be “non-detectable” at slaughter. Regarding detectable cases, the impact of moving to visual-only inspection was negligible for most notifiable diseases and conditions considered with a few exce
ISSN:0956-7135
1873-7129
DOI:10.1016/j.foodcont.2013.11.009