Evaluation of the Safety Consumption and Adulteration for Red Minced Meat Products in the Local Markets of Baghdad

Abstract

Meat serves as a rich source of numerous vital nutrients for humans, the contamination, adulteration and fraudulent of minced meat have raised a serious legal, religious, and medical problems in Iraq and other countries. The purpose of this study was to investigate the minced meat validity throughout detecting of common bacterial contamination and identifying animal meat species in addition to investigate of halal authentication using conventional and molecular methods. A total of (100) distinct minced meat items were randomly gathered in various regions of Baghdad city. The first step in this study was explore the bacterial contamination with routine and molecular assays, meat tissue were cultured on different media. So, bacterial isolates were subjected to macroscopical, microscopical and biochemical tests, for more confirmation the molecular diagnosis using 16SrRNA as a housekeeping-genes was conducted by PCR. Also, four sets of primers were designed to test the pathogenicity of bacterial isolates by targeting of virulent gene for each one as gap, ttr and rfb genes for Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella spp. and Escherichia coli O157:H7 respectively. The second step of focused on animal meat species, by molecular assay highlighted the origin of meat species, a set of eight primers specific to cytochrome (cyt) b gene family for detect the chicken, cattle, sheep, goat, horse, pig, donkey and dog meat. One hundred minced meat samples examined revealed that there was a significant level of bacterial contamination involved 43%, 9% and 9% by Staphylococcus aureus, Salmonella spp. and E. coliO157:H7 respectively. And, 24% adulteration and mislabeling in beef minced meat label with sheep, goat, and chicken. Tow positive sample were recorded for donkey species, while negative results were documented for dog, horse and pig meat species in all examined sample. The study determined that the examined meat products showed presence of a high percentage of bacterial contamination in meat products, which poses a direct threat and danger to human health. Clear evidence of adulteration. The employed mitochondrial DNA based multiplex PCR proved to be a valuable and uncomplicated technique for verifying the species of the meat products.