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The bacterial status of beef carcasses at a commercial abattoir was monitored before and after slaughterline automation. Bacterial counts did not differ significantly overall (P>0·05) between the original manual line and the automated line for either morning or afternoon slaughter. On the manual line counts in the morning were lower than those from carcasses slaughtered in the afternoon, but on the automated line there was no difference between morning and afternoon counts. Due to highly significant line × sample site interaction for both morning and afternoon counts, overall differences among sample sites were not found by analysis of variance. However, principal components analysis revealed a significant shift in bacterial contamination among some sites due to slaughterline changes. The incidence of Enterobacteriaceae increased marginally following automation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In two surveys of three commercial abattoirs a minimal apparatus method for making bacterial counts, the ‘loop-tile’ method, detected the same trends in bacterial numbers on beef carcasses as the ISO reference method applied to the same samples. Both methods showed the carcasses from one abattoir, that with an export licence, to carry consistently higher numbers of bacteria, and one of the four sites sampled on each carcass to be consistently dirtier than the other three. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]