Effective Antimicrobial Treatment to Prevent Carcass Contamination

Many different disease-causing microbes, or pathogens, can contaminate foods and lead to foodborne illnesses. Every year, as many as one in six Americans experiences a foodborne illness, meaning they get sick by consuming contaminated foods or beverages. Pathogen decontamination of meat carcasses to control meat contamination at the start of the meat processing is one of the methods to eliminate disease-causing microbes. The food safety goals of the slaughter process are to minimize bacterial contamination of the carcass and to effectively remove any contamination. These goals improve food safety and extend shelf-life of the meat.Theobjective of this project is to develop a BacMOX™ system to demonstrate an effective, portable, and user-friendly process for microbial contamination of animal carcasses to reduce the microbial load of fresh meat without the use of expendable reagents. Achieving 4- to 6-log reduction will represent a technical breakthrough, outperforming all of the current existing decontamination methods at lower cost. The technical effort will focus on the fabrication and development of a functional electrolytic BacMOX™ system and demonstration of its efficacy on relevant meat products. Phase II will focus on refinement of the system design, integration and testing at Meats Pilot Plant.