Meat during the summer, AUV calls for caution when transporting home

Meat and animal products require special care, especially during the summer season, where high temperatures prevail. Except the care of the outside and the private AUV also calls on consumers for caution during their home meat transport.

Food and Veterinary Agency spokesman (AUV), Lamir Thaci, in an interview for KosovaPress, says that during the summer the central focus on regular controls have oversight of products requiring refrigerator conditions, such as meat and other products of animal origin.

We are now in summer season and temperatures are very high, not only business operators, but we all need to be careful when buying and transporting meat either from the market or from the points where we buy because the meat is very sensitive to high temperatures, so it's always called for refrigerator maintenance. If it's fresh meat, then there should be no temperature higher than 3 degrees, while if it's frozen meat it should never go to temperature higher than 18. It is recommended that we be careful, in addition to transportation to our homes even in storage in our families' refrigerators and in the cooking process”, he points out.

It shows steps AUV takes for products that fail to meet the legal conditions for consumption.

“We're monitoring the market for products from import, local products, and wherever we've encountered products that haven't met the legal conditions for consumption, we've always acted initially on seizures, destruction of meat that has resulted in failing to meet the conditions, and to all business operators, we initiate ballot for court and the court then decide on penal measures.... "Within the year we always get numbers of about 100 thousand kilos of animal products, which include milk and milk products. But that's different, in certain years it could go up to 300 thousand pounds. There have been years when the million is past”, let him know.

AUV spokesman Lamir Thaci says any cargo imported to the Republic of Kosovo must have supporting documentation guaranteed on product safety, in contrast, says it is not allowed to enter Kosovo.

If the meat wants to be kept frozen, then each load should come to a temperature below -18 degrees and each time the container is controlled that, through the special device that measures the temperature during the journey, it shows the temperature all the time that the container has moved to Kosovo. And here the agency's inspectors show very high care that each shipment entering Kosovo meets all conditions. On the contrary, any cargo that fails to meet the legal conditions on product security is not allowed to enter Kosovo”, he adds.

In internal control, Thaci stresses that it requires that the slaughter be carried out in licensed slaughterhouses, and only when the veterinarian says everything is safe, the meat is allowed to be passed into the market for consumption.

The AUV continues to have a small number of veterinarian inspectors, but aims that through the transition of municipal inspectors to AUV it will complete their number for covering the entire Republic of Kosovo.

We don't have enough numbers (of inspectors). Now how many years we've submitted the request that we've lacked veterinarian inspectors. We are often covering ourselves with municipal inspectors, who are the first to get to the AUV very soon and when we take it, it will only be a responsible authority in the Republic of Kosovo that will oversee food safety”, he says.