Safety and quality assurance in the domestic swine production chain

The Regulation (EU) No 2017/625 is a milestone in the official controls regulations, as it provides key changes in all the activities performed to ensure the compliance with food and feed law, as well as with rules on animal health and welfare, plant health and plant protection products. The application of this Regulation in the meat industry involves reasonable approaches and new concepts to obtain a risk reduction that should be at least equal to conventional meat factories that apply the traditional meat inspection. Moreover, it pays more attention to non-compliance with good hygiene practices in slaughterhouses as a guarantee of both product quality and public health. The existing ante- and post-mortem inspections do not enable detection of the main bacterial and parasitic foodborne hazards, such as Salmonella spp., Yersinia enterocolitica, Trichinella spp. and Toxoplasma gondii. In pig slaughtering, it has been demonstrated that palpation and incision during post-mortem inspection can mediate bacterial cross-contamination, and therefore they should be limited to suspect pigs, identified through the food chain information and/or ante- or post-mortem visual observation of relevant abnormalities. Possible alternative methods could be based on validated laboratory tests able to detect the most frequent biological hazards in the pork production chain. In addition, a high hygiene degree is recommended to minimize carcass contamination throughout the slaughter process. The aim of this study is the description of the main official control activities, as well as the mandatory requirements for the slaughter manager in an Italian medium-scale slaughterhouse, according to the current European legislation. In particular, the microbiological criteria (i.e., aerobic colony count, Enterobacteriaceae and Salmonella spp.) set by Commission Regulation (EC) No 2073/2005 and further amendments, have been evaluated on pig carcasses tested at the end of the slaughter line from four different sites, according to ISO 17604:2003. Another task of this chapter is the description of the sampling procedure of domestic swine carcasses susceptible to Trichinella spp. infestation and the reference methods of analysis according to Commission Regulation (EU) No 1375/2015. About the last feature, this chapter reports also the accreditation procedure and the requirements for its maintenance applied by the investigated medium-scale slaughterhouse, according to the global accreditation system