Day 097 - 06 Mar 95 - Page 67
1 Q. How often do you find salmonella?
2 A. On occasion we find salmonella.
3
4 Q. In what sort of quantity?
5 A. Just a presence of.
6
7 Q. A presence?
8 A. Yes, not terribly often.
9
10 Q. How often does it -- perhaps I will put it a different way.
11 So far as I am concerned, Mr. Chambers, unless his Lordship
12 wants any more from this map at the moment, you can fold it
13 as carefully as you can and close that particular file.
14 I am sorry you will have to get out a different file. Can
15 you put that one away, please, and replace it with pink
16 file VIII in which, please, turn to tab 3 which I hope is a
17 McKey document headed "Microbiological Guidelines", is it?
18 A. Yes.
19
20 Q. Is this something which would be sent to you or not?
21 A. Sorry?
22
23 Q. Would this be something that is sent to Midland Meat?
24 Would you have a copy of it?
25 A. Yes.
26
27 Q. Staying on the first page, the first paragraph says: "The
28 raw material microbiological standards list in the
29 deboners' beef specification are as follows: satisfactory
30 total colony count less than 500,000", I think that works
31 out at 5 times 10-5 per gramme, right?
32 A. Yes.
33
34 Q. Then passable the total colony count or TVC is from 500,000
35 to 5,000,000, right, per gramme?
36 A. Yes.
37
38 Q. Then it says what is unsatisfactory is a colony count of
39 more than 5,000,000 per gramme?
40 A. Yes.
41
42 Q. Do you test according to these guidelines?
43 A. We test lots of different samples today, yes.
44
45 Q. Do your other suppliers require microbiological tests of
46 this kind?
47 A. Yes.
48
49 Q. What sort of standard do they use?
50 A. They would be fairly similar to those.
51
52 Q. Fairly similar. How obvious in the meat which you are
53 thinking of supplying to McKey do you find samples which
54 are unacceptable so that the meat has to be rejected?
55 A. We would not necessarily be checking. What we do is we
56 check the meat as it is coming off our production lines.
57 Whether we not we catch specifically McKey meat in that is
58 another issue.
59
60 Q. In course of the day's work, roughly speaking, how many
