BACTERIOLOGICAL QUALITY OF RAW EYES (Gohara)

Nowadays, the meat industry more than ever before looks to the meat producing animal from two points of view. The first is the value of the lean meat and the other is the "by-product credit" of the other edible and inedible products. Offals are among the edible by-products, and are highly demanded because of their low price, agreable taste and considerable nutritive value. Head meat is one of the offals derived from the major meat animals, they are either offered as a sort of food or they are used comminuted as ingredients in some processed meat products. (Gerrard, 1977; Swingler, 1982 and Harry and William, 1986). As livestock are slaughtered mainly for their meat; low attention is given to the offals particularly heads because they incised for detection of cysticerci and low attention paied to them as a source of contamination because of mishandling of them as trailing on the floors and dirty scalding water. They become heavily contaminated by various types of micro- organisms through this mishandling, harvesting, transportation, storage and through processing and serving (Patterson and Gibbs, 1979, Harry and William 1986 and Lotfi et al. 1988). In USA and UK the eyes are examined for presence of squamous cell carcinome (epithilioma). They are condemned for this reason, In Germany they are excluded, but in Egypt they remain attached to the head and still edible. In Egypt, the eyes and its surrounding muscles of slaughtered food animals (Gohara) constitute a popular part of the cooked head meat in special offals serving shops (Masmat). The object of the present study is to evaluate the bacteriological status of raw eyes (Gohara) of slaughtered cattle, buffaloes and camels.