Meat inspection - today's requisitions

While in former times classical, pathological-anatomically definable findings were the centre of attention during meat inspection, today, animals for slaughter (in particular pigs) are frequently latently infected and too young to be able to show pathognostic characteristics. The consequence was that meat inspection by incision was pushed into the background in favour of a more and more visual meat inspection, in order to reduce the danger of uncontrolled contamination of meat by unnecessary cuts. Parallel with higher slaughtering numbers and continuous reduction of the times set for inspection the legal basis of meat inspection changed. Thus, the implementation regulation to the meat hygiene law reduced the inspection time up to 17 % for cattle and 44 % for pigs, which with the simultaneous, clear increase of slaughter numbers per hour led to modern, EDP-supported data collecting systems to manage the increasing data flood. With introduction of the European Union hygiene package the collection, electronic storage and transmission of the meat inspection data to the producer become legal obligation. Only by using EDP-supported systems large data sets can be registered and used in a sensible way also with respect to "food chain information". In this article a short overview points out these current developments and their possibilities.