Sanitation and Tissue Residue Problems in High Quality Pork - Review -

Food safety or sanitation are terms broadly applicable to procedures designed to ensure that food quality is high and free of factors which may adversely affect human health. These factors include zoonotic diseases and acute and chronic effects of ingesting natural and human-made xenobiotics. Use of drugs in animal production for the treatment and control of animal diseases, to promote growth rate, and to improve feed conversion efficiency has expanded year by year, thus increasing the possibilities for occurrences in animal products of residues harmful to humans. Governmental agencies have made efforts to control or prevent residue problems. The Korean Food and Drug Administration (KFDA) is charged with the responsibility of establishing tolerances for veterinary drugs, pesticides, and mycotoxins and other non-pharmaceutical substances. The Department of Veterinary Service is responsible for establishing guidelines regarding withdrawal times of drugs, approval of drugs, their uses, and sanitation enforcement of livestock products. The authors describe the toxicological basis for the establishment of tolerance levels for xenobiotics and the pharmacokinetic basis for establishing withdrawal time for veterinary drugs. The regulatory tolerance levels of chemicals in pork and swine feed, Korean regulations on the use of feed additives, rapid residue test methods, the National Residue Program, and the Food Animal Residue Avoidance Databank are discussed. Rapid EIA methods that are under development for the screening of live animals are described These methods predict tissue residues from an examination of blood samples taken from pigs before they are slaughtered.