The Veterinarian's Role
These two trips dovetailed the information much better than I ever expected. The result was a thorough understanding of the global food chain, not just ensuring that your slaughterhouse is clean or your pigs are healthy.
The veterinarian’s traditional role has been to ensure that only safe medications are used on feed animals, that zoonoses are treated/prevented, and that the animals appreciate an adequate quality of life (welfare).
We’ll look again at what veterinarians are capable of doing now, within the regulatory system in just a minute.
The healthy animal leaves the farm, and is transported to the slaughterhouse. The animal is humanely slaughtered, a veterinarian (traditionally) inspects the carcass for any gross signs of disease, parts are “trimmed in” for residue testing by laboratory personnel. The plant is clean, shiny, and well-lit.
The cuts of animal are processed, wrapped, labeled with production date information, and refrigerated until shipment to the distributor. The distributor sends the meat to the final retailer, where it is inspected by the final consumer and purchased.
The customer is happy for an economical, fresh piece of meat, goes home, and happily cooks it, using best of kitchen sanitary methods.
Of course, this isn’t how the real world works, well, not entirely.
Being able to track how much each animal is eating, where the animals came from, past exposures, and pathogen risk assessment/metaphylaxis is very important to both the veterinarian effectively preventing disease, and the farmer who is interested in feed conversion. RFID tags are small, inexpensive, and can be humanely inserted at a young age. Tracking ID tags via management software and tag readers allows the farmer and vet to work as a team to ensure healthy animals, and certainty of identification/treatment. This minimizes inappropriate treatment (medication into the wrong animal), flags an animal as a “poor doer” faster than the pen checkers, and thereby prevents the transmission of subclinical disease further up the food chain.
The old merchants’ worry is always that the package of goods he bargained for is not the package of goods which is actually delivered. This becomes very concerning when talking about feed additives and contaminations, since most feed looks like any other feed.
The dioxin scare of the Netherlands showed that this was not the case. The main port of The Netherlands is Rotterdam, which has an intricate network of canal systems. These systems allow barges to carry goods from the port mouth to feed plants located on the system, where large cranes unload the goods. Like any machinery, the cranes use lubrication oil. One day, somebody mistook a drum of lubrication oil for a drum of vegetable oil, and the lubrication oil was used to make the feed. Unfortunately, the
lubrication oil was not safe for consumption, containing the chemical dioxin. The end result was dioxin contamination of huge amounts of meat, and public outcry.
Meat and feed both need to be tested regularly, and during all stages of the process to ensure no inadvertent contamination or swapping of goods has been made. This is, of course, easier said than done.
TRUSQ is a cooperative feed quality management company which was formed after the dioxin scare. The Six largest feed producers in The Netherlands joined together to ensure that their feed ingredients had been followed back to their respective point of origin. Never to be pigeon-holed, a veterinarian actually is currently the head of the organization. Certainly this is not a traditional career choice for a veterinarian.
Now, how does TRUSQ know what levels are “safe” to be found in feed ingredients? They look to the OIE (aka, World Organization for Animal Health), which is an independent body of Chief Veterinary Officers of 163 member countries. The OIE meets biannually to set international standards regarding the care of animals, safety of the food chain, and enzootics.
The beauty of bringing 163 veterinarians from around the world to make policy is that the CVOs present are the ones who have to enforce the policy in their country. If a developing country is unable to test to a certain level which developed countries want, the lesser developed country can raise that point. The result is more practical policy set in place.
Why is this so important? We live in a global economy, where a cow slaughtered in Kansas may be ultimately eaten in Russia. If the USA detects a case of BSE, Russia could easily (and rightfully) demand proof that all other beef in the USA is BSE free, before resuming trade relations. In the meantime, farmers and the USA’s economy suffers terribly.
My personal opinion is that we need 100% traceability to the carcass and feed. It’s feasible, and cheaper than cleaning up a mess.
2LT Mary Avriette RVT, MBA
DVM/MPH candidate
Class Representative 2010
University of Minnesota
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