Improvement in the Usability of Meat Inspection Findings for Swine Herd Health Management

TL;DR

A new system for meat inspection in pigs provides more detailed health data to help improve herd management and animal welfare.

Contribution

A multi-level system for recording lung and pleura alterations in slaughtered pigs was developed and tested for usability.

Findings

Low-grade lung alterations were most common (28.4%), followed by moderate (11.3%) and high-grade (5.2%).

Most carcasses (88.9%) showed no pleural alterations, with low-grade pleurisy being the most frequent (4.7%).

The new system was implemented efficiently without extra time and provided heterogeneous health data across batches.

Abstract

Official veterinarians inspect meat to ensure that it is fit for human consumption; however, the meat inspection reports provided to farmers are currently limited to only yes/no answers for several pathological findings. A more detailed and standardized system for data collection is needed to increase the usefulness of the information for the primary sector. In this work, a multi-level recording system for alterations of the lungs and the pleura (no changes, low-grade, moderate-grade, and high-grade alterations) was developed. Trained staff applied this system to 20,345 carcasses slaughtered at four different abattoirs located in two different federal states of Austria. Data for 408 batches from 318 different farms were recorded in total. The analysis of the data obtained showed that frequency of pulmonary and pleural alterations was quite heterogeneous between the slaughter batches. It showed that more detailed information could be easily collected within the obligatory evaluation process. Once this standardized system is introduced on a routine basis, it can provide useful and informative feedback for farmers and veterinarians. Ultimately, the results showed that the information collected provided added value for pig farmers and the supervising veterinarians ensuring animal welfare and contributing to improved, sustainable animal husbandry.

Data from post-mortem inspections conducted using official controls on the meat production of slaughtered pigs are generally considered valuable for identifying herd health issues and ensuring meat safety. However, several studies highlighted that a multi-stage assessment of lung changes would provide more useful information on animal health than the implemented binary (yes/no) recording. For this purpose, a new scheme was developed and subsequently used by trained official veterinarians at four slaughterhouses in Austria. Implementation of the multi-stage assessment was carried out in parallel with the conventional assessment, and data collected from both schemes were analyzed and compared to evaluate effectiveness. The analysis of the data (n = 20,345) showed that the most common alteration was low-grade (28.4%), followed by moderate-grade (11.3%,) and then high-grade pneumonia (5.2%). In the case of pleurisy, 88.9% of the carcasses showed no alterations of the pleura, and 11.1% had pathological changes (low-grade pleurisy = 4.7%, moderate-grade pleurisy = 2.7%, high-grade pleurisy = 3.7%). Analysis of the results showed a strong heterogeneity of the frequency of alterations between the batches reflecting various underlying animal health issues. Among the influencing factors, the origin of the pigs had the greatest influence. The project demonstrated that the new evaluation can be carried out easily with no extra time effort once staff are trained and the technological platform for reporting is adapted. The more detailed information ensures more useful feedback is provided to the farmers and supervising veterinarians, thereby ensuing animal welfare and contributing to sustainable, improved animal husbandry.

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