HACCP/RMP Adoption in the New Zealand Meat Industry

In New Zealand, the Animal Products Act 1999 requires that all animal product primary processing businesses must have a risk management programme (RMP) based on the principles of Hazards Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP). However, due to market access requirements, many primary food exporters have voluntarily adopted HACCP systems for food safety management since the 1990s. This paper studies the process of HACCP/RMP adoption and the transition from voluntary HACCP to mandatory RMP in New Zealand Meat Industry. The main issues explored are plants' motivations, implementation problems, costs and benefits associated with the implementation of HACCP/RMP. The paper concludes with implications for policy design and further research.HACCP/RMP implementation, HACCP/RMP benefits and costs, New Zealand Meat Industry, Agricultural and Food Policy,

Study of meshing of beveled gears with normally decreasing arc teeth

The meshing of beveled gears was studied by the direct and inverse approaches. Gear wheels with teeth of equal height are studied, and wheels with normally-decreasing arc teeth. Different coordinate systems are utilized to plot the determination of the rotation of the originating gear wheel and the meshing line of the gear wheel which is cut. Matrices are used to determine the equations of the originating surfaces and the unit vectors of the normals to these originating surfaces

A Nonparametric Approach to The Analysis of HACCP/RMP Implementation Process

In this paper we conduct an analysis of the implementation of HACCP/RMP in the NZ Meat Industry based on the data collected from our recent survey. Nonparametric methods are used to measure the association between plant characteristics such as size, age, activities, and food safety management practices and HACCP/RMP adoption motivations, implementation problems, benefits, and costs. Results give insights into the ongoing process of mandatory RMP in New Zealand.HACCP/RMP implementation, New Zealand Meat Industry, nonparametric methods, Agricultural and Food Policy, Crop Production/Industries, Environmental Economics and Policy, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use, Livestock Production/Industries, Research Methods/ Statistical Methods,

Improvement of conditions for meshing spiral bevel gears

The effect of axial pinion displacement on gear meshing conditions during cutting and correction of the rolling chain gear ratio are analyzed. The so-called inverse problem-solving method is used

Reproductive and developmental effects of phthalate diesters in females.

Phthalate diesters, widely used in flexible plastics and consumer products, have become prevalent contaminants in the environment. Human exposure is ubiquitous and higher phthalate metabolite concentrations documented in patients using medications with phthalate-containing slow release capsules raises concerns for potential health effects. Furthermore, animal studies suggest that phthalate exposure can modulate circulating hormone concentrations and thus may be able to adversely affect reproductive physiology and the development of estrogen sensitive target tissues. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of the epidemiological and experimental animal literature examining the relationship between phthalate exposure and adverse female reproductive health outcomes. The epidemiological literature is sparse for most outcomes studied and plagued by small sample size, methodological weaknesses, and thus fails to support a conclusion of an adverse effect of phthalate exposure. Despite a paucity of experimental animal studies for several phthalates, we conclude that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that phthalates are reproductive toxicants. However, we note that the concentrations needed to induce adverse health effects are high compared to the concentrations measured in contemporary human biomonitoring studies. We propose that the current patchwork of studies, potential for additive effects and evidence of adverse effects of phthalate exposure in subsequent generations and at lower concentrations than in the parental generation support the need for further study

The baseline intracluster entropy profile from gravitational structure formation

The radial entropy profile of the hot gas in clusters of galaxies tends to follow a power law in radius outside of the cluster core. Here we present a simple formula giving both the normalization and slope for the power-law entropy profiles of clusters that form in the absence of non-gravitational processes such as radiative cooling and subsequent feedback. It is based on seventy-one clusters drawn from four separate cosmological simulations, two using smoothed-particle hydrodynamics (SPH) and two using adaptive-mesh refinement (AMR), and can be used as a baseline for assessing the impact of non-gravitational processes on the intracluster medium outside of cluster cores. All the simulations produce clusters with self-similar structure in which the normalization of the entropy profile scales linearly with cluster temperature, and these profiles are in excellent agreement outside of 0.2 r_200. Because the observed entropy profiles of clusters do not scale linearly with temperature, our models confirm that non-gravitational processes are necessary to break the self-similarity seen in the simulations. However, the core entropy levels found by the two codes used here significantly differ, with the AMR code producing nearly twice as much entropy at the centre of a cluster.Comment: Accepted to MNRAS, 8 pages, 9 figure