Day 111 - 30 Mar 95 - Page 52
1 animal -- in the slaughtered carcass before evisceration,
2 then it is checked in the chiller and in the boning room,
3 then it was checked on arrival at the process factory and
4 then eventually it is a finished product, a raw product but
5 finished, and ready to go to a slaughter to be cooked; if
6 the levels were rising at each stage in the monitoring
7 through this kind of testing, would you be able to draw any
8 conclusions from that?
9 A. No, you would not, other than if, obviously, if the
10 total viable count became very high, but until it became
11 very high I would probably be organoleptically able to see
12 that the meat was spoiling anyway.
13
14 TVs are not useful in this sense and, as a rule, they do
15 rise usually. If you take a sample of meat from a carcass,
16 from inside the muscle at the beginning of the slaughter,
17 unless the animal has a bacterial disease that has invaded,
18 the animal has become septicaemic, it carries the bacteria
19 in its blood and, hence, it will be in the muscles as well,
20 there will not be any bacterial counts inside the muscle,
21 in most cases. Even on this point the scientist used to
22 say that meat is sterile inside the muscle in a live
23 animal.
24
25 Q. So meat flesh, generally, has no bacterial contamination?
26 A. Yes, but even that has become under the dispute lately
27 by the scientists, so I would not even say that. But,
28 basically, total viable counts in fresh muscle that has not
29 come into contact with outside world yet are very, very
30 low, if totally uncountable. You seldom manage to
31 cultivate anything from the muscle.
32
33 Q. So most of the bacterial contamination, if I understand
34 your evidence correctly, the source for that is the gut?
35 A. Yes, most of it -- at the abattoir conditions, yes,
36 most of it could be the gut or faecal contamination from
37 the hide. The origin is from the gut, but some of it has
38 obviously come out already when the animal is alive and it
39 has contaminated the skin and the hair of the animal.
40
41 MR. JUSTICE BELL: We are going over ground we have been over
42 more than once before now, are we not?
43
44 MR. MORRIS: OK. I was just trying to clarify.
45 (To the witness): Could I just ask a question? If you do
46 micrological tests for, say, salmonella, or listeria, is
47 that done in a different way from the general TVC counts?
48 A. Yes, it is.
49
50 Q. So what I am saying is if a TVC count is 500,000, does that
51 mean that there will be less than 500,000 salmonella or
52 that it is just not related at all?
53 A. Well, there could even be more because salmonella, as
54 I am sure that Mr. Bennett mentioned it as well, as far as
55 I can remember, that salmonella requires a very complicated
56 cultivation method; it does not grow readily in
57 (indiscernable), so that -- the same applies to
58 particularly to campylobacter -- is one of the reasons why
59 TVCs are totally useless when it comes to pathogenic
60 bacteria. They are no indication of the safety or vice
