CONTROL PLANS IN THE POULTRY INDUSTRY
Zoonoses are infectious diseases transmissible from animals to humans. The impact of zoonoses not only lies in the damage to public health, but also causes severe economic losses in the region.
There is a wide variety of food zoonoses, although the most common are caused by:
- Campylobacter sppr: responsible for the most frequent food zoonosis.
- Salmonella spp: cause of the most common zoonosis in food outbreaks.
There are surveillance and control programs for this type of microorganism, aimed at intersectoral cooperation within the ” One Health ” framework, which require the intervention and collaboration of human, animal and environmental health professionals.
As established in the Regulation (CE) nº 2160/2003 for the control of Salmonella in the National Surveillance and Control Programs , the participating laboratories such as Convet must be recognized or authorized by the competent bodies of the Autonomous Communities in which they are located, and operate in accordance with the European standard EN/ISO 17025 .
The fields required to identify the herd must be indicated in the Annex for taking samples SELF-CONTROL within the framework of the NATIONAL PROGRAM FOR SURVEILLANCE and CONTROL of Salmonella spp; are the following:
- REGA code: 12 alphanumeric digits that will be validated in the REGA.
- Birds entry date: date of entry of the birds of that flock in the farm with format (mm-yyyy). In the event of birds entering the warehouse on several days (corresponding to successive months), the month of the first entry would be taken into account (according to the documentation of the transfer of the birds or farm records).
- Vessel: They must be identified with a capital letter, as specified in the National Control Programs. Numbers cannot be used to identify ships.
- Species: as appropriate, one will be chosen from the dropdown (breeding birds, laying hens, broilers, fattening turkeys, breeding turkeys).
All these fields are mandatory, being necessary the accuracy of the data in order to be able to comply with the community and national regulations. The data must be consistent with the information from official controls.
Special attention must be paid to the data included in this document, so that the samples strictly comply with the technical specifications established in the National Programs and in the community regulations and, especially, with regard to the frequencies and ages of sampling and sample types (specimen and quantity).
As specified in the National Programs: “laboratories must reject samples that do not meet the sampling requirements specified therein”, and inform the owners of the farms and responsible veterinarians of these incidents.
Zoonotic Salmonella is understood as the following serotypes:
- In breeding hens: Enteritidis / Typhimurium, including the monophasic variant / Virchow / Hadar / Infantis.
- In other species: Enteritidis / Typhimurium, including the monophasic variant.
- Campylobacter spp in broiler and turkey carcasses, update of Regulation (EC) No. 2073/2005. The revision of Regulation 2073/2005 allows a 50% reduction in the risk of campylobacteriosis by setting the limit at 1000 cfu/g for broiler and turkey carcasses.
In the proposal of the limit, the difficulty of controlling Campylobacter has been considered and taking into account that vertical transmission does not seem to be an important risk factor and everything depends on the effectiveness of biosecurity measures. Therefore, a tiered approach that tightens the process hygiene criteria gradually has been proposed.
Currently, action is required if the 1000 cfu/g level is exceeded for neck skin samples after carcass chilling at processing plants in 15 of 50 samples from 10 consecutive sessions. The number of samples allowed to exceed the limit will be reduced to 10 in 2025.
The objective of increasing the control of Campylobacter spp in chicken and turkey carcasses is to improve slaughter hygiene, review process controls, the origin of the animals and the biosecurity measures in the farms of origin. Food operators do not see an increased administrative burden with these new controls, since in the sampling plan they can follow the same process hygiene criteria for Salmonella spp in poultry carcasses. The same skin samples from the neck can therefore be used for the enumeration of Campylobacter spp.
