A Case Study to Explore Influence of Traceability Factors on Australian Food Supply Chain Performance

Traceability in food supply chain has been an area of interest due to the challenges associated the nature of the food supply chain with short code date, high safety and risk associated with quality. With the introduction of EU Regulation 178/2002 to have mandatory traceability for food supply without defined structure of product or process to be traced makes the level of traceability a vulnerable aspect across the supply chain. The level of traceability is strongly associated with the resources required to trace & track and the supplier buyer relationship, which would help to implement an effective traceability systemThe objective of the study is to understand the interrelationship between the level of traceability (breadth, depth and quality of information) and the resources required (technology,financial and human) in achieving the given level of traceability and contribution of supplier-buyer relationship on the supply chain traceability performance using a case study based approach. The study shows as the dairy products are split into individual unit for the retail stores and not associating the batch number to the product movement from the distribution center to the retailers would create the critical traceability uniform tracking and tracing system would help in efficiency gain by reducing the product receiving time approximately from 4 hours to 20 minutes, which can reduce in humanly efforts at this stage and may help in achieving huge cost savings

Development and evaluation on a wireless multi-gas-sensors system for improving traceability and transparency of table grape cold chain

There is increasing requirement to improve traceability and transparency of table grapes cold chain. Key traceability indicators including temperature, humidity and gas microenvironments (e.g., CO2, O2, and SO2) based on table grape cold chain management need to be monitored and controlled. This paper presents a Wireless Multi-Gas-Sensors System (WGS2) as an effective real-time cold chain monitoring system, which consists of three units: (1) the WMN which applies the 433 MHz as the radio frequency to increase the transmission performance and forms a wireless sensor network; (2) the WAN which serves as the intermediary to connect the users and the sensor nodes to keep the sensor data without delay by the GPRS remote transmission module; (3) the signal processing unit which contains embedded software to drive the hardware to normal operation and shelf life prediction for table grapes. Then the study evaluates the WGS2 in a cold chain scenario and analyses the monitoring data. The results show that the WGS2 is effective in monitoring quality, and improving transparency and traceability of table grape cold chains. Its deploy ability and efficiency in implantation can enable the establishment of a more efficient, transparent and traceable table grape supply chain.N/

Pleural effusion: Role of pleural fluid cytology, adenosine deaminase level, and pleural biopsy in diagnosis

Objective: The present study is designed to evaluate the role of pleural fluid analysis in diagnosing pleural diseases and to study the advantages and disadvantages of thoracocentasis and pleural biopsy. Materials and Methods: We prospectively included 66 consecutive indoor patients over a duration of 1 year. Pleural fluid was collected and cytological smears were made from the fluid. Plural biopsy was done in the same patient by Cope needle. Adequate pleural biopsy tissue yielding specific diagnosis was obtained in 47 (71.2%) cases. Results: Tuberculosis was the commonest nonneoplastic lesion followed by chronic nonspecific pleuritis comprising 60% and 33.3% of the nonneoplastic cases respectively and tuberculosis was predominantly diagnosed in the younger age group. Majority (70.8%) of malignancy cases were in the age group of >50-70. Adenocarcinoma was found to be the commonest (66.7%) malignant neoplasm in the pleurae followed by small-cell carcinoma (20.8%). Conclusion: Pleural biopsy is a useful and minimally invasive procedure. It is more sensitive and specific than pleural fluid smears