Day 111 - 30 Mar 95 - Page 41
1 boning hall were not sterlised properly during the working
2 day.
3
4 Q. In what way?
5 A. That you had sterlisers, a few, I cannot remember how
6 many, knife sterlisers, small knife sterlisers, next to the
7 hand wash basins in the boning hall but, usually, the main
8 sterlisation, and the most important part of the steriliser
9 in a boning hall is done during the work breaks, whether
10 they are long breaks or short breaks, all the equipment,
11 all the metal aprons, all the metal gloves, all the knives
12 and all the implements that are used in meat, hooks and so
13 on, are put in a big sterliser where they are left during
14 the break time. This is the only way to keep up a fairly
15 disinfected environment in a boning hall during the working
16 day.
17
18 It is bad practice to have a lot smaller sterlisers next to
19 wash basins. The whole practice of boning meat is quite
20 different from slaughtering. In a slaughter hall, every
21 slaughterman has their own little bit that they do. In
22 between these bits, they have time to change their knives,
23 put one knife in a steriliser and take another one out.
24
25 Q. Try to go a bit more slowly.
26 A. In the boning hall it is more a continuous type of work
27 and nobody expects the meat cutters, as they are called, in
28 the boning hall to be able to sterilise their knives in
29 between different cuts. We are dealing with much cleaner
30 material as well. But, in the boning hall we are concerned
31 with a build up of contamination during the day. That is
32 why it is very important to have a thorough sterlisation of
33 implements during the breaks.
34
35 This was not happening at Jarretts. They did not have
36 equipment for sterlisation. That was one of the
37 suggestions that I made which was taken up by the
38 management and I understood that, just a couple of weeks
39 after I finished working there, this equipment was
40 installed in the boning hall. It is very rarely you find a
41 boning hall where you would not have this equipment.
42
43 Q. So before we move on to TVCs, and other things like that,
44 would you say that Jarretts is a well run abattoir?
45 A. Well, in my professional opinion, it was not as far as
46 the hygiene of the operation was concerned.
47
48 Q. What was the effect they were having on what you have said
49 to be the risks in the raw meat, the risks for public
50 health, what was the effect, overall effect, that the
51 abattoir was having on those risks, or just summarise what
52 you feel the health implications are of the way that the
53 abattoir was being run?
54 A. Well, in my opinion, the lack of the listed, as
55 I mentioned earlier, hygiene procedures and the problems
56 related to good practices, they did increase the
57 possibility of both contamination and growth of bacteria on
58 the carcasses. Since we assume, as an Official Veterinary
59 Surgeon who takes responsibility of all the material that
60 goes out of that particular plant, I have to work from an
