Pros and cons of carcass decontamination: The role of the European Food Safety Authority

Various intervention strategies to control foodborne pathogens have been identified and applied through the whole food chain. Physical, chemical, biological treatments applied alone or in combination have been studied and proved to reduce the number and the prevalence of bacterial contamination of meat surfaces such as carcasses. The various treatments have their own advantages and disadvantages. In EU, chemical decontamination was not permitted until the recent revision of European food hygiene legislation which allows the use of substances other than water for the removal of meat surface bacterial contamination. The European Commission will authorise the use of such substances after the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) has provided a chemical and a microbiological risk assessment. For this purpose, EFSA issued a guidance document which points out the major components and prerequisites that a study/dossier should contain in order to prove that the substance intended to be used for the removal of microbial surface contamination of foods of animal origin (i) would not pose any appreciable risk to the public health (safety or chemical assessment) and (ii) would result in a significant reduction of the prevalence and the numbers of pathogenic target bacteria when compared to the control and when this reduction is at the same time of relevance to human health (efficacy or microbiological risk assessment). The current paper deals only with microbiological safety issues.