Milk-and-Dairy-Products-in-Human-Nutrition-FAO

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Milk and dairy products in human nutrition
6.6 Emerging issues
Some of the main emerging issues associated with milk and dairy quality and safety
include the following:
• The private dairy sector must behave responsibly; the emergence of fraudulent
practices resulting in illness and death has given rise to new concerns.
• National food-safety agencies responsible for ensuring the safety and quality
of the final product must maintain their vigilance. They must address many
food hazards, including those that may be intentionally added, e.g. melamine,
addition of whey powder, vegetable fat and maltodextrin in milk powder, and
citrate in UHT milk.
• Animal feed quality plays a vital role in ensuring the safety of milk and dairy
products.
• There is an increasing demand from consumers for raw milk and dairy
products produced from raw milk. This poses new challenges for regulatory
authorities where pasteurization in mandated, and calls for a re-assessment of
production practices to ensure the safety of these products.
• Emerging pathogens, including Cronobacter spp. and MAP, require further
investigation to determine the risk to consumer health.
• Debate around the acceptable use of veterinary drugs in animal husbandry
including establishment of agreed international standards continues.
• Anti-microbial resistance caused by over or inappropriate use of antimicrobials
in the animal health sector (in addition to antibiotics used in treating
human diseases) is an emerging public-health concern. Although milk that is
pasteurized or treated to destroy bacterial contaminants is very unlikely to
be a vector for drug-resistant bacteria, unpasteurized milks may be a vector.
6.7 Key messages
6.7.1 Safety of milk and dairy products
The safety of milk and dairy products must be ensured to protect consumers, particularly
vulnerable consumers such as children for whom milk can be a beneficial
dietary component, and to support the livelihoods of dairy farmers and processors.
Raw or poorly processed and/or handled milk and milk products can lead to
food-borne illness in humans. Pasteurization or equivalent processing of milk and
milk products and the implementation of validated food-safety programmes have
been proved to ensure safe milk and dairy products.
A great deal is known about the sources of hazards that can compromise the
safety of milk and dairy products and the necessary controls and preventive measures
to ensure products are safe. The risk-reduction measures required vary with
the hazard and the intrinsic product characteristics so that while it may not always
be necessary to eliminate the hazard completely, its presence must be minimized to
provide an acceptable level of consumer protection. Raw milk or raw-milk products
should be individually assessed for their potential risk to public health and appropriate
risk-management strategies implemented.
There is increasing evidence of the importance of the safety of animal feeds and
the natural environment where animals graze/live in preventing chemical hazards
including dioxins.