Day 111 - 30 Mar 95 - Page 51
1 MR. MORRIS: You have seen these documents, have you?
2 A. Yes.
3
4 Q. When you flick through them, do you have any conclusions
5 regarding whether they have got better or worse or whether
6 they can show you anything?
7 A. Well, as I said earlier, I would disregard, I would not
8 even want to comment on any of the other swabs than the
9 ones that were taken in the boning hall or, basically, the
10 surface swabs taken anywhere. They are obviously very poor
11 and I do not see any improvement happening over these
12 months, that the results are available for us.
13
14 Q. Bearing in mind the limitations that you have expressed
15 about these kinds of tests, what kind of levels of TVC
16 would concern you if it was in a product, a finished
17 product?
18 A. Of a meat product?
19
20 Q. Yes.
21 A. Basically, I must say that I would not want to comment
22 on that. I have no speciality in food hygiene. As a
23 general, I work with fresh meat and abattoirs. Basically,
24 there are no fixed TVC counts on fresh meat either. There
25 have been several attempts in the history of public health
26 to set these sort of guidelines. As far as I can remember,
27 the only country where there has been statutory
28 requirements for the bacterial counts in fresh meat is
29 United States in the 1970s. Some States there had
30 5,000,000 as a limit for legal sale of meat.
31
32 But those regulations were obviously abolished on the basis
33 of the same as we now do not want -- no scientist even
34 wants to set any limits because total viable counts, as
35 I said, are very poor aids. They can only do one thing and
36 even that thing they can do it poorly. So, they cannot
37 tell us anything about the safety of the meat. So, you can
38 have total viable count of 100 in a sample of meat and that
39 piece of meat can be dangerous to eat. So, to set a limit
40 up to 5,000,000, a legal limit, and then the of the meat
41 could say: "Well, this is legal meat, total viable count
42 is 5,000,000". That is the reason why we do not want to
43 set up any limits.
44
45 Q. Right. When you use this for monitoring and you found that
46 in a process from the live animal to the slaughtered animal
47 to different steps of the phase before it becomes a
48 finished product, if the level was rising all the time,
49 would you be able to draw any conclusions, would that help
50 with the monitoring?
51 A. The level of?
52
53 Q. If the TVCs found were rising at each stage?
54 A. The meat?
55
56 Q. Yes.
57
58 MR. JUSTICE BELL: What do you mean by "each stage"?
59
60 MR. MORRIS: If the counts -- I do not know about the live
