K A S H R U T . C O M_©

New Russian technique uncovers meat contamination

December 14, 2017 from Securing Industry

"The journal Meat Science, designed a technique to identify ten meat species and tested it on 53 meat samples from supermarkets in Moscow and the Moscow Region."
"The samples - which included salamis, sausages, cutlets, canned meat and frozen ready-to-cook food – tested for five commonly consumed and five commonly banned meat species, including beef, lamb, pork, chicken, turkey, cat, dog, rat, mouse and human."
"According to the results analysing the technique’s performance, 49 out of the 53 samples contained meat species not listed on the label, with the most frequent adulteration being the substitution of quite pricey meat (such as beef and turkey) by chicken, which suggests economically motivated adulteration."
"A couple of samples were also found to contain trace amounts of sheep DNA, which had not been listed on the label, while DNA from rats and humans were found in two samples, in cutlets and sausages, respectively."
"The presence of sheep was likely to be through contamination during manufacturing or sale, while “the gross non-compliance of sanitary rules in food manufacturing and/or processing could be the only explanation for human and rat Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) fragments detected in samples Nos. 22 and 40”."