18th December 2007:
There has been a small amendment made to the meat hygiene regulations at the European level. The amendment relates to the red meat carcass testing requirements for Salmonella. The change is that the area of the carcass used for Salmonella sampling has increased from minimum of 100 cm2 per site to a minimum of 400cm2 per carcass sampled. Please note that this change does not effect those who have adopted the sponge swab sampling method described on this site.
July 16th 2007:
The scientific paper that formally reports the statistically-significant improvements in carcass and environmental surface microbiological test results in UK plants has been published in the July 2007 issue of the Journal of Food Protection. The Journal is peer-reviewed which means that before publication, data and how any analyses have been interpreted are independently and anonymously scrutinised by knowledgeable academics. The formal publication of these findings bring the UK up to date with the USA, New Zealand and Australia and makes it one of the few countries that has actively collected, analysed and reported test result trends from their slaughterhouses. The results of the analyses make an extremely positive statement about the steadily-improving microbiological quality of product being generated by high-throughput meat processors in the UK. The UK is the first EU member state to make publicly-available summaries of their plant's test results widely available to the UK's and other consumers. A link to the Journal of Food Protection download page is here. If you are not an IAFP member and would like a reprint copy of the paper free of charge, please send an email to mike.hutchison@bris.ac.uk.
January 4th 2007:
The Meat Industry Guidelines (MIG) are now available from the main FSA Website. The entire MIG (nearly 600 pages long) is available here.
Part 3 of the MIG (which relates to the Microbiological Criteria for meat) is available as a PDF download from this site by clicking here.
This page was last updated: Tuesday December 18, 2007