الفهرس 
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Abstract
Consumption a safe food considers as one of the major concerns of the societies. Each year, millions of people worldwide are getting sick or die as a result of eating contaminated meat or meat products. In Egypt there is no precise estimation of the foodborne diseases but in the United States of America, new estimates of food borne disease have shown that major pathogens cause 9.4 million incidents of food borne illness, 55,961 hospitalizations and 1351 deaths each year.
The last few years have provided ample evidence that control of food safety is critical. Recent media reports have clearly documented supply chain shortcomings that have threatened consumers’ health and safety. These ongoing problems and the need for consumer safety carry out for additional tools to dramatically reduce or eliminate risks. ISO 22000 and other food safety management systems are international standards intended to be used by organizations within the food chain. The purpose of those systems is to provide a practical approach to ensure the reduction and elimination of food safety risks as a means to protect consumers. Meat processing compose a large scale of food industries in Egypt.
Contaminated Meat products with bacteria are of public health significance such as fecal Streptococci, Enterobacteriaceae, coliforms, and other pathogens. These could pose health risk to the consumer. Nationally and worldwide, it is evident that life-style and food consumption behaviors have changed; i.e., the commitment to meat preparation at homes are decreased and number of processed meats eaten is increased.
The present study was conducted to implement Food safety management systems in meat processing plants, to identify all food safety hazards and their adequate control at each step within the meat production chain, to establish a food safety management system that complies with the requirements of ISO 9001, to develop written prerequisite programs, TACCP and to develop a HACCP plan and identification of critical control points (CCPs) for the safe production of meat products.
A total of 100 random samples of meat and meat products represented by processed minced meat, beef kofta, hot dog and burger (25 of each) were collected from different meat processing plants in Alexandria city. All collected samples were subjected to bacteriological examination to evaluate the microbial status of the meat and meat products that were processed at FSMS meat processing plants in Egyptian governorates.
The designing of this study was to analyze the knowledge of food safety and activities among meat processing plants food safety teams in some meat processing plants in order to detect any levels of microbial contamination on various processing steps such as receiving, preparation, storing, equipment, workers’ hands, tables or any other food contact places or processing steps.
A cross-sectional survey research was performed to evaluate the knowledge of food safety and activities among meat processing plants staff of various FSMS implemented categories in Alexandria city.
The survey was conducted to evaluate the current level of hygiene in different establishments processing meat directly or its products, such as meat factories, hot-dog and sausage, canned meat and other meat processing plants. Keeping in mind that the choice of those plants was categorized to two classes according to establishing and implementing of a Food Safety Management System into; FSMS meat processing plants and non-FSMS meat processing plants.
The study questionnaire was prepared in accordance with ISO 22000, HACCP, GMPs and TACCP systems, which were stated to be used to prevent the occurrence of foodborne hazards from production through manufacturing, storage and distribution of meat products.
The questionnaire was built-in Arabic language and consisted of 85 items on workplace environment information, food safety knowledge, employee practices, food safety hazards, hazard control and management practices. An observation sheet checklist was also applied to ensure the validity of workers’ responses to items of the questionnaire.
Plus, the evaluation of food safety knowledge and practices among meat processing plants staff, sterile swabs were collected and grown on sterile microbiological dishes to test levels of microbial contamination (including entero-pathogenic bacteria; e.g. Salmonella spp., Shigella spp., Coliform bacteria. .etc.) on various surfaces such as processing equipment, operators’ hands, tables or any other food contact places. The microbial contamination assessment was conducted to obtain a better insight into the current food safety practices in food premises.
The study included 5 meat-processing plants of all categories in Egyptian governorates. The evaluation of food safety knowledge and practices among meat processing staff showed that those of meat processing plants that implement a FSMS are the better than those meat processing plants that do not implement any of FSMS. Food safety knowledge of Meat processing employees was good knowledge for FSMS meat processing plants (mean score: 79.38 ± 12.51) while there was a poor knowledge for non-FSMS meat processing plants (mean score: 41.26 ± 12.60). It was also noticed that there is a direct relation between workplace environment and food safety knowledge and practices. In addition, it was appeared that there was a lack of supervision. For practices of plant managers, the results revealed that there was a lack in manager practices which was increased in non-FSMS meat processing plants with a mean score of 23.33 followed by FSMS meat processing plants, there was a lack in practices of workers in non-FSMS meat plants with a mean score of 43.72, than the FSMS meat processing plants with a mean score of 85.76. It is possible that if managers had circulated and commit more during the work, the employees would have been more likely to follow the proper food safety knowledge and hazard control practices, being reprimanded for improper procedures.
The microbiological assessment of hygiene reflects the effective implementation of the food safety management systems and will be reflect as proper safe food handling.
The study found that the meat processing plants that follow and implement any of FSMS was the least contaminated as all samples that were collected from FSMS-meat processing plants were free from pathogenic bacteria such as Salmonella Spp., Shigella Spp, B. cereus, E. coli and coliforms. However, some swabs recorded the presence of few yeast and mold colonies.
On the other hand, the non-FSMS meat processing plants all samples recorded higher microbial load than FSMS-meat processing plants. That could be observed clearly from the heavy culture of yeast and higher colony numbers of mold on RBC agar.
This raises many public health concerns, as most of the meat plants operators were not wearing gloves during meat processing, as was observed during the study. The fungal growth could be attributed to the presence of fungal spores in production sections atmosphere, which reflects relative insufficient cleaning and improper disinfection process. This status could eventually increase the risk of food poisoning. Additionally, typical morphological colonies related to S. aureus were noticed in four swaps that were collected from worker hands of non-FSMS meat processing plants. Subsequently, the suspected colonies were further confirmed by coagulase test which affirmed that the examined sample was coagulase-negative. One swab from operators’ hands and two samples of sausage and kofta recorded typical colonies of coliforms and E. coli by incubation on VRBL and EMB agar, respectively. By incubation of suspected colonies on TW broth medium and applying of indole reagent, red ring confirmed only in two samples. The third swab result reflects absence of tryptophanase enzyme that catalyzes deamination of tryptophan which indicated by the absence of red ring. Therefore, the results of such sample recorded as negative E. coli.
The presence of some foodborne pathogens in samples collected from the non-FSMS meat processing plants revealed that hands of operators are the main reason for fecal contamination. Besides, the lowest sanitation practice and absence of cleaning procedures in overall meat processing plants surfaces lead to this fact. In general, such differences in microbiological analysis between the two categories could be attributed to number of factors, including personal hygiene, construction facilities, availability of hand wash and surface sanitizers, quality of sanitization solutions and frequency of sanitization per day.
from the study in hand, it can be recommended that there is a fundamental demand to regularly monitor the practice of Food safety management systems to be established and implemented especially cleaning procedures in every meat processing plants regardless of its economic level, because maintaining cleanliness is a general requirement. It is necessary to improve the cleaning and disinfection procedures of the worker’s hands, and contact surfaces for food and non-contact surfaces, which are the main contributors of hazard analysis and control.
The presence of cleaning guidelines is a vital and key aspect for reducing the bacterial burden on any surface in meat-processing areas, which later reduces the risk of transmission of foodborne diseases through meat and its products. National standards and regulations should be established to ensure food safety and preserve the public health. Further studies are required to involve large number of food processing plants and to enhance awareness and practice related to food safety among meat processing operators.