Salmonella in meats, water, fruit and vegetables as disclosed from testing undertaken by Food Business Operators in Ireland from 2005 to 2009.

UNLABELLED: Food Business Operators (FBO) are responsible for the safety of the food they produce and in Ireland those under the regulatory control of the Department of Agriculture, Food and Marine are required to provide summary data on microbiological tests undertaken as part of their food safety controls. These data are provided to the National Reference Laboratory through the 25 private laboratories undertaking the testing. RESULTS: Over the five-year period Salmonella sp. was isolated from 0.7% of the 254,000 raw meat or raw meat products tested with the annual prevalence ranging from 0.5 to 1.1%. Poultry meats were consistently more contaminated than other meats with higher recovery rates in turkey (3.3%), duck (3.3%), and chicken (2.5%) compared with meats of porcine (1.6%), ovine (0.2%) and bovine origin (0.1%). Salmonella sp. was also isolated from 58 (0.06%) of the 96,115 cooked or partially cooked meat and meat products tested during the reporting period with the annual percentage positive samples ranging from 0.01 to 0.16%. A total of 50 different serotypes were recovered from raw meats over this period with the greatest diversity found in poultry samples (n = 36). Four serotypes, Kentucky, Typhimurium, Agona and Derby accounted for over 70% of all isolates detected on FBO testing over the period 2005 to 2009. CONCLUSIONS: Capturing microbiological data generated by Food Business Operators allows the regulatory sector access to a substantial amount of valuable data with the minimum financial outlay.

Estimation of prevalence of Salmonella on pig carcasses and pork joints, using a quantitative risk assessment model aided by meta-analysis.

This risk assessment study aimed to estimate the prevalence of Salmonella on pig carcasses and pork joints produced in slaughterhouses, on the basis that within groups of slaughter there is a strong association between the proportion of Salmonella-positive animals entering the slaughter lines (x) and the resulting proportion of contaminated eviscerated pig carcasses (y). To this effect, the results of a number of published studies reporting estimates of x and y were assembled in order to model a stochastic weighted regression considering the sensitivities of the diverse Salmonella culture methods. Meta-analysis was used to assign weights to the regression and to estimate the overall effect of chilling on Salmonella incidence on pig carcasses. The model's ability to produce accurate estimates and the intrinsic effectiveness of the modeling capabilities of meta-analysis were appraised using Irish data for the input parameter of prevalence of Salmonella carrier slaughter pigs. The model approximated a Salmonella prevalence in pork joints from Irish boning halls of 4.0% (95% confidence interval, 0.3 to 12.0%) and was validated by the results of a large survey (n = 720) of Salmonella in pork joints (mean, 3.3%; 95% confidence interval, 2.0 to 4.6%) carried out in four commercial pork abattoirs as part of this research project. Sensitivity analysis reinforced the importance of final rinsing (r = -0.382) and chilling (r = -0.221) as stages that contribute to reducing considerably the occurrence of Salmonella on the final product, while hygiene practices during jointing seemed to moderate only marginally the amount of contaminated pork joints. Finally, the adequacy of meta-analysis for integrating different findings and producing distributions for use in stochastic modeling was demonstrated.