Meat Safety in Northern Tanzania: Inspectors' and Slaughter Workers' Risk Perceptions and Management

Abstract

of frontline actors who engage with meat, and the ways in which social, material and institutional realities shape these, is important for understanding how decisions about risk and meat safety are made in the complexity and context of everyday life, and thus for finding effective ways to support them to further enhance their work.

Meat Safety in Tanzania’s Value Chain: Experiences, Explanations and Expectations in Butcheries and Eateries

“…Third, the preoccupation of inspection with visible abnormalities suggest a lack of awareness around invisible pathogens originating from healthy animals' gastrointestinal tracts ( [47] under review). The microbiological component of HAZEL suggests there is an opportunity for butchers in particular to take responsibility for avoiding contamination of meat with such pathogens.…”

“…The items covered a range of questions that were in a carefully calibrated way aligned with other HAZEL research being undertaken with actors in other sections of the meat value chain such as operators of slaughter slabs and frontline government officials [21,47]. Definitions of "major events," "food safety," etc.…”

“…Such perceptions of limited agency contrast with operators of eateries who strongly emphasised their own agency in relation to meat safety. Other research finds that Tanzanian slaughter workers experience less agency than butchers ( [47] under review). This suggests that actors' subjective experience of control increases across the value chain, with slaughter workers feeling least empowered to ensure meat safety, butcherers having some sense of agency and finally eatery operators feeling that they are able to ensure meat safety through their own actions.…”

“Everything in this world has been given to us from cows”, a qualitative study on farmers’ perceptions of keeping dairy cattle in Senegal and implications for disease control and healthcare delivery

“…Whilst there are numerous studies in Europe and New Zealand utilising the good farmer framework, there is a notable lack of such work in Sub Saharan African farming systems where research tends to be predominantly single disease focused and quantitative in nature. Of note are two recent publications which adapt the good farmer framework to examine the perceptions and practices of Zambian sheep and goat traders [ 22 ] and the risk perceptions and management practices of meat inspectors and slaughter workers in Northern Tanzania [ 21 ].…”

“…However, the majority of research within farming populations in Sub Saharan Africa on knowledge, attitudes and practices remain quantitative in nature [12][13][14]. In the past decade the value of social science approaches has been increasingly recognised in animal health and welfare research, as they allow investigating in depth social, economic, historical and cultural factors that shape the contexts within which disease occurs [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Using a social science lens, the boundaries of a study can be expanded to analyse wider dimensions such as economic, political and geographical factors that influence disease occurrence, transmission and measures for control [23].…”