Die amtliche Fleischuntersuchung der Tierart Rind in Deutschland: Retrospektiven, Status quo und Perspektiven.

Official meat inspection of cattle in Germany:retrospectives,
status quo and perspectives. Meat inspection in cattle has been
carried out for a long time and, over the course of centuries, has
been adapted to the needs of society and scienitific progress. The
currently practised official meat inspection in cattle was
established at a moment the epidemic status of which is not
concurrent to the disease status of modern cattle herds. The data
published anually by the Federal Statistic Office concerning the
frequency and distribution of diagnoses made in the slaughterhouses
support the change in the epidemic status of modern cattle herds.
In former times, the aim of official meat inspection was the
determination of typical pathological findings, whereas nowadays,
the symptoms of classical epidemics are observed less commonly and
latent infections occur more frequently. Concurrently, the
consumers' demand for high quality and risk-free food produced in
accordance with animal welfare concerns increases. Numerous food
scandals and especially the BSE crisis in the 1990s lead to a
marked decline in the sale of beef in Germany. To take into account
these developments, the "White Paper on food safety" was adopted in
2000, aiming to a revision of the EU food hygiene rules. Major
components of these new legal provisions are risk analysis and
traceability. To accomplish these aims, the concept of food chain
information was developed. In order to ensure a maximum degree of
food safety, the complete food production chain, from producer up
to consumer, has to be fashioned in a transparent and traceable
way, in relation to the risk emanating from the food product in
question. In future, the primary responsibility for food safety has
to be assumed by the feed manufacturers, the farmers and the food
operators, while the competent authorities control the compliance
with the legal requirements via national control systems. Another
new element of food law is the concept of risk analysis, consisting
of risk assessment, risk management and risk communication. Modern
considerations in quality assurance and consumer production have to
integrate the enormous information flow between slaughterhouses and
farms of origin into jurisdiction processes. In the long run, only
complete transparency concerning herd health, veterinary treatments
and diagnoses obtained in the slaughterhouse is suitable for
determining and reducing risks associated with beef. In addition,
it is absolutely necessary to integrate primary production into
health monitoring. By carrying out ante-mortem inspections at the
holdings of provenance, animals with latent infections could be
excluded from the production chain at an early stage, therefore
minimizing the risk of contamination of other carcasses. In the
pork production sector, these considerations have already been
implemented by establishing a comprehensive and integrated quality
assurance system. Such systems impose a higher degree of
responsibility on the farms and make increased demands on farm
management. Similar quality assurance systems, which might in the
long run entail ante-mortem inspections at the holdings of
provenance, can therefore not be applied to all areas of beef
production, but only to large enterprises.