Austrian Agency for Health and Food Safety (AGES), Division for Data, Statistics and Risk Assessment, Beethovenstraße 8, 8010 Graz, Austria.
Prev Vet Med. 2013 Sep 1;111(3-4):278-85. doi: 10.1016/j.prevetmed.2013.05.018. Epub 2013 Jun 26.
According to legal regulations, all slaughtered pigs in the European Union are subject to routine meat inspection at the slaughterhouses. The resulting post-mortem findings are valuable indicators that help improve slaughterhouse and farm management and can be used to establish a feedback system regarding animal health. A sufficiently high quality of meat inspection is therefore imperative, which implies that the results of the inspection must not depend on the person carrying out the examination. The objective of the study at hand is the estimation of the amount of variation in these post-mortem findings that can be attributed to the official meat inspectors. In order to reduce the influence of the heterogeneity in the health state of the pigs, the variation due to the farms of origin was considered in the statistical model as well. The analyzed meat inspection data were recorded by 12 official meat inspectors under real working conditions at an Austrian slaughterhouse. Logistic Multilevel Models with cross-classified random effects were applied to 20 post-mortem findings. On the basis of these models, variance partitioning coefficients (VPCs) were used to estimate the amount of variation in the probabilities of these findings due to meat inspector and farm levels. The estimated VPCs suggest that especially meat inspection of blood aspiration, scalding water lungs, skin lesions and hepatitis can be deemed as not sufficiently standardized. Hardly any variation in meat inspection could be identified for other post-mortem findings, such as pericarditis, peritonitis, arthritis and milkspots.
根据法律规定，所有在欧盟屠宰的猪都要在屠宰场进行例行的肉品检验。由此产生的尸检结果是非常有价值的指标，有助于改善屠宰场和农场的管理，并可用于建立有关动物健康的反馈系统。因此，肉品检验的质量必须足够高，这意味着检验结果不能取决于进行检查的人员。目前这项研究的目的是估算可归因于官方肉品检验员的这些尸检结果的变异量。为了减少猪健康状况异质性的影响，在统计模型中还考虑了来自农场的变异。所分析的肉品检验数据是由 12 名官方肉品检验员在奥地利屠宰场的实际工作条件下记录的。采用具有交叉分类随机效应的逻辑多层模型对 20 种尸检结果进行了分析。基于这些模型，使用方差分解系数（VPC）来估计由于肉品检验员和农场水平导致这些发现的概率的变异量。估计的 VPC 表明，尤其是血液抽吸、烫水肺、皮肤损伤和肝炎的肉品检验可能不够标准化。对于其他尸检结果，如心包炎、腹膜炎、关节炎和牛奶斑，几乎没有发现肉品检验的差异。
