Pork safety and quality through livestock welfare: 1. Welfare of pigs on the farm

In this paper the impact of animal welfare on commercial pig farms to pork safety and quality is widely discussed and analyzed. The variety of stressors associated with farm practices, such as animal health and nutrition, breeding and reproduction, housing and environment, their interactions, the inputs and outputs, is presented for both the determination of on-farm welfare indicators and the estimation of their effects on pork safety and quality. Risk analysis and HACCP principles are applied as a valuable adjunct to farm practice in order to organize the information and analyze the representation of physical processes in quantitative mathematical terms, so that welfare indicators can be evaluated and predictions can be made. Finally, this study concludes by supporting the decision making process at farm level oriented towards animal welfare and food safety and quality, with supporting farm experience and scientific literature

Pork safety and quality through livestock welfare: 1. Welfare of pigs on the farm

In this paper the impact of animal welfare on commercial pig farms to pork safety and quality is widely discussed and analyzed. The variety of stressors associated with farm practices, such as animal health and nutrition, breeding and reproduction, housing and environment, their interactions, the inputs and outputs, is presented for both the determination of on-farm welfare indicators and the estimation of their effects on pork safety and quality. Risk analysis and HACCP principles are applied as a valuable adjunct to farm practice in order to organize the information and analyze the representation of physical processes in quantitative mathematical terms, so that welfare indicators can be evaluated and predictions can be made. Finally, this study concludes by supporting the decision making process at farm level oriented towards animal welfare and food safety and quality, with supporting farm experience and scientific literature.</p

Pork safety and quality through livestock welfare: 2. Pig welfare during pre-slaughter and stunning

Pig welfare from farm to slaughter can be defined by the stress the animals undergo when faced with new environments. Recent reports concerning animal welfare during transport and at the time of slaughter in Greece indicate that corrective actions should be taken by the Greek authorities in particular to supervision and monitoring the situation of transportation, resting and stunning of animals. Slaughter pigs are currently subjected to number of handing practices from the moment they leave their fattening pen until they stunned at slaughter. New management practices taking into account animal welfare during pre-slaughter and stunning (fasting, loading, transport, lairage, stunning system) must be adopted in order to limit animal stress from farm to slaughter. Some of these practices (equipment, logistics, training of the personnel) to be implemented are discussed. Apart of the issue of the animal welfare, the lack of adequate preparation of pigs on farm (fasting) and the use of poor handling systems throughout the pre-slaughter period also lead to carcass depreciation and meat quality defects (PSE, DFD) which reflect in great economic losses for the industry.</p

Kerr Nonlinearity Dominance Diagnostic for Polarization-Dependent Loss Impaired Optical Transmissions

We present a method to classify optical transmission systems as linear or nonlinear based solely on signal-to-noise ratio statistics in presence of PDL-induced time-varying-performance. It obtains excellent accuracy (&gt;95%), and it is proven accurate and robust under all the investigated conditions

Some factors determining the shelf life of vacuum packed heat-treated Greek sausages

The bacteria Total Plate Count (TPC), Lactobacilli, pH and water activity influencing the shelf life of Greek vacuum-packed, heat-treated sausages kept at 7 °C were investigated. Samples of six types of whole and sliced, vacuum packed sausages were tested at weekly intervals and until sensory defects occurred. The TPC and Lactobacilli reached counts of about or over 10 8 cfu/g at the end of the products' shelf life and were followed by a drop in pH to about or below 5.7. The findings showed that the shelf life of all the products falls short of the producer's recommended sell-by-date, due to higher counts of bacteria and to a faster pH fall of the products

The Gaussian Noise Model Extended to Polarization Dependent Loss and its Application to Outage Probability Estimation

We extend for the first time the Gaussian-noise model to account for polarization dependent loss (PDL) and validate it both numerically and experimentally. The model can be used to estimate outage probabilities induced by PDL-nonlinearity interaction in fast simulation times

Machine Learning-Driven Low-Complexity Optical Power Optimization for Point-to-Point Links

We propose a strategy to dynamically adjust transmitted power solely based on the analysis of performance fluctuations due to polarization-dependent loss. We show that our method converges faster to optimum compared to a standard approach