Summary

The current situation is that each poultry business undergoes some research on enteropathogen in-house relying upon literature and guidance from overseas experts. From our experiences what may work in the USA or EU doesn’t work very well in Australia due to a multitude of reasons. A summary of all the current knowledge in this field and from a meta-analysis and expert opinion to create a short list of best practices for each step along the production chain, from farm to fork. This meta-analysis data can be used to predict virtual risk and will allow industry to preform virtual intervention strategies from their desks and select which strategy works best for them. This strategy can then be verified using real data.
The virtual risk tool already exists and is known as PRIA (Probalistic Risk Informed Analysis) and was create by the not-for-profit (NPO) USA organisation Battelle for the Department of Homeland Security to prevent Bioterrorism of USA food and water. Australia already has a poultry processing version of this tool and an outcome of this project is to produce a poultry industry tool for the whole production chain.

Based upon the level of risk for each segment of the production chain a manual will be written to alleviate this risk across the industry and improve the overall perception of product from the Australian chicken meat industry.

While it may appear that feed withdrawal time is a small component in the processing chain there is a lot of different guidelines and theories as to which withdrawal time works best. There are currently 8-12 hours from the FAO/FDA research and 8-18 hours for RSPCA and FSANZ 8-14 hours. The industry will be well suited to investigate which feed withdrawal time works best for Australian growing and processing conditions and the effect these times have on gut integrity/health and pathogen load. This will lead to developing an Australian Industry specific guideline to best suit Australian conditions.

Program

Chicken Meat

Research Organisation

Baiada Poultry Pty Ltd

Objective Summary

Review the existing industry food safety guidance document for growers and Produce an industry guidance document for food safety management during chicken, and potentially turkey and spent hens processing in Australia via a systematic review of all literature from 2009 onwards from Grandparents to product distribution of poultry, turkeys and spent hens.

Perform a meta-analysis of data from objective 1 along with a survey of industry experts to identify which intervention strategies are more likely to work.

Clarifying/reviewing the feed withdrawal time window that impacts on the integrity of the gut and implications for management of food safety through processing via controlled experimentation on gut intregrity verus feed withdrawal times.
Build a risk model/matrix which will give the end point user real-time theoretical baseline to which measures employed would greatly benefit the end point user
We believe that these three objectives should be conducted simultaneously as a single through chain project to produce a document and a how to manual which will be based upon risk reduction strategies. These strategies will come from a combination, consolidation and consultation of current industry knowledge which will form the basis of direction of the meta-analysis from all the information available from the systematic review of the literature of advances in the control of enteropathogens since the last review of Cox and Pavic 2009 (128 citations and >10,000 downloads).