Review on Food Animals Stress and Food Quality and Safety Risk

Abstract

All food animals will experience some level of stress during their lives. Stress reduces the fitness of an animal, which can be expressed through failure to achieve production performance standards or targets, or more drastically, through injury, disease and death. Stress in food animals can also have detrimental effects on the quality and safety of food products. However, knowledge of food animals’ stress and its effect on the quality and safety of food products is scanty. The aim of this review article is to examine the current knowledge on the potential effects of stress in food animals on food quality and safety risk. Stress in food animals can have detrimental effects on the quality of food products. The effect includes; decline in processing properties, functional quality, eating quality and shelf life. Therefore, it is very automatic to cause huge financial loss to the food industry. Furthermore, stress in food animals have a significant deleterious effect on food safety through different potential mechanisms affecting the susceptibility of food animals to infections as well as the carriage and shedding of foodborne pathogens such as E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and Campylobacter. Since stress in life is unavoidable, we can never expect to develop ideal conditions that will always keep our animals stress free. Therefore, changes in management practices to promote animal well-being and to minimize stress can reduce losses in product yield and quality, as well as food safety risks to consumers.

Keywords: Food animals; food quality; food safety; stress

DOI: 10.7176/JBAH/12-1-02

Publication date: January 31^st 2022