Strengthening food safety assurance during Tet

(Baonghean) - During the Lunar New Year, the demand for food increases, and ensuring food safety is a top concern for consumers as well as authorities. However, the work of checking food safety and hygiene, and animal quarantine at slaughterhouses, processing and transporting these items still has many shortcomings.

To have safe food, in addition to implementing good clean livestock farming processes at farms and ranches, attention must be paid to ensuring hygiene in the stages of slaughtering, processing and circulating fresh food.

In recent years, our province has focused on controlling slaughterhouses, but in reality, the facilities at slaughterhouses are still backward. Currently, Nghe An has 32 centralized slaughterhouses under control, all of which are only classified as type B, meaning they have only "touched the standard" in terms of regulatory requirements.

In addition, dozens of spontaneous slaughterhouses are even more difficult to meet standards, because the slaughtering takes place on a small scale and lacks investment in equipment and infrastructure. This shows that ensuring hygiene in slaughterhouses is currently a difficult problem, difficult to solve completely. Facilities have not separated the slaughtering area, the initial processing area and the clean meat storage area. The organ removal stage also does not have hygienic shelves, and the slaughtering and meat transportation tools have not been disinfected.

Slaughterhouse located in Hung Chinh commune (Vinh city).

Hung Chinh Commune's centralized slaughterhouse - one of the units that does a good job of ensuring hygiene in slaughtering in the city with a construction area of ​​300m2. It can be said that to "meet the standards", the cost of building infrastructure is an important factor. In this area, the areas for keeping live animals and the areas for storing waste in septic tanks with a capacity of 50m3 are separated. The remaining area is a fish pond to help reduce environmental pollution in the surrounding area.

To ensure quarantine work, Vinh City Veterinary Station has assigned a veterinary officer to work directly at the furnace to directly inspect and quarantine before putting into the furnace. Meat products when put on the market are stamped with quarantine by veterinary officers.

According to Mr. Nguyen Hong Quang - Vice Chairman of Hung Chinh Commune People's Committee, this facility slaughters 30 to 40 pigs per day to supply mainly to the city market. Currently, the most difficult thing is to mobilize households engaged in livestock slaughtering in the area to bring livestock to the slaughterhouse. At the same time, during the construction and operation process, the cost of repairing equipment is quite expensive. Investing in a standard slaughterhouse requires a lot of money and must strictly comply with medical factors, so in general, many facilities are still "far from standard".

Animal quarantine in the area is also complicated. Meanwhile, the vaccination rate in the autumn of 2014 and supplementary vaccination is low. Ensuring vaccination for more than 690 thousand buffaloes and cows, more than 970 thousand pigs and more than 15 million poultry in the whole province is not easy. In November and December 2014 alone, there were outbreaks of foot-and-mouth disease in livestock in some areas.

Although the epidemic was controlled in time, from now until Tet, the weather has many unusual developments, leading to more unpredictable livestock and poultry diseases. Meanwhile, the transportation and sale of food during Tet has increased, and the situation of trading and transporting livestock and poultry of unknown origin or without quarantine certificates is still complicated. Although it has not yet reached its peak, in recent months, according to the authorities, there have been 58 cases of illegal transportation with more than 230 thousand poultry, 681 pigs, 43 buffaloes, cows and nearly 5 thousand eggs.

Regarding fresh food that has been slaughtered and pre-processed, there is still a situation of transporting meat with signs of disease, stench and unhygienic conditions with more than 6,000 kg, of which, especially serious are nearly 4,300 kg of internal organs, 340 kg of pork, 460 kg of sausage... In addition, there are more than 16 cases of re-quarantine and return to the place of origin with more than 18 thousand poultry and 948 pigs.

Currently, in Vinh City, there are more than 10 trading locations, 16 markets and many supermarkets selling food products. At Vinh market, Mr. Trinh Xuan Tien - Head of the Food Products Management Board said: "Currently, the market has more than 50 stalls selling pork and 25 stalls selling chicken and duck. The stall owners mainly source their supplies from the districts of Hung Nguyen, Nghi Loc, Nam Dan, Do Luong and Yen Thanh. During the time near Tet, the number of meat stalls will increase according to market demand.

Thus, controlling the amount of food sold in the market area is also posing many difficult problems when the amount of meat consumed is not small... Discussing the issue of ensuring the hygiene of fresh food sources before, during and after Tet, Mr. Bui Van Doan, Head of Animal Quarantine Department of Nghe An Veterinary Department said: "Currently, the unit has assigned 14 specialized officers to daily check and monitor the safety status of food in markets, supermarkets and slaughterhouses. During the time near Tet, we can mobilize more officers to be able to closely monitor the market reality.

Especially for the Bac Nghe An Quarantine Station - where most of the food transported into the province is quarantined, we have directed the Station to arrange 24/7 security forces, proactively coordinate with the Hoang Mai Town Police and the Traffic Police Team to strengthen strict inspection of the transportation of animals and animal products through the station. All are aimed at improving the effectiveness of quarantine work to ensure safe food sources for the Lunar New Year."

Thanh Quynh