Surveillance and control of Salmonella spp. in bovine meat safety assurance systems in nine European countries

The aim of this study was to describe and compare, where possible, Salmonella surveillance and control (SC) in the bovine meat safety assurance systems (MSAS) of nine European countries. Data were collected from legislation, guidelines, and official public reports describing the SC systems in 2021. Each component of the SC was described using technical variables: supporting legislation, targeted serovars, sampling, detection methods, and surveillance outputs. European Union (EU) regulations gave baseline standardization for biosafety, sampling protocols, and detection methods, but mainly in the industrial links of the beef chain. Consequently, the targeted serovars and the SC activities varied considerably between beef chain stages and countries. At the national level, four clusters were identified: Finland, Norway and Sweden, which implemented similar surveillance systems for cattle and beef in 1995; Denmark and Estonia, which developed active cattle surveillance systems more recently; Greece, Italy and Portugal, which did not have major operative SC activities beyond the EU legislative demands and therefore no active SC for cattle; and Serbia, which is not an EU member, although mostly applied EU legislative demands but no other SC activities. The lack of standardized SC at farm level was a gap in the MSAS. In addition, different targeted serovars at different beef chain levels may be considered as mismatches in the MSAS. Consistent reactions to similar serovars detected in feed, animals and food are necessary for efficient One Health and MSAS approaches. Comparison and subsequent development of the programmes would benefit from harmonized and detailed descriptions of the current programmes and availability of the outputs.