Animal health and food quality

Healthy animals - healthy food

The research focus "Animal Health and Food Quality" includes many topics of the goals of the EU (Green Deal) and reflects the interdisciplinary cooperation of the institutes and clinics at the TiHo, which deal with the various aspects of sustainable production of food of animal origin over the entire food chain. This starts with primary production in the barn and on the farm and continues with the extraction of the food, its technological processing, the ready-to-eat product for the consumer, and the methods and applications of Veterinary Public Health. Animal health is the important prerequisite for food quality, so the clinical and paraclinical disciplines are closely linked with the food science disciplines in this research focus.

The aim is to highlight the contribution of food production and processing to animal health, food quality and thus animal welfare on the one hand and consumer protection on the other hand in interdisciplinary research approaches. This includes, for example, topics such as:

• Detection and characterization of foodborne infectious and intoxication pathogens and tracing of contamination pathways through the food chain, in particular Salmonella, Campylobacter, Listeria, Clostridium botulinum
• Rapid microbiological methods for food testing
• Modern technologies in meat production and environmentally safe production of high quality and safe foods
• Resistance behavior, molecular biological characterization and transfer of resistance by food hygiene relevant bacteria

Directly related to these topics are aspects of animal welfare and animal protection. On the one hand, this involves investigating, describing and combining the interactions of animals with their environment in order to develop approaches to promote welfare, health and performance on this basis in the interests of animal welfare. This includes aspects such as:

• Animal-environment interactions, the spread of potentially pathogenic agents and possible residues
• Reducing the spread of pathogens, especially zoonotic and food hygiene relevant pathogens, in and from livestock operations
• Housing conditions of livestock (e.g. ventilation, air quality, pathogen introduction and spread, feeding, management and care)
• Development of husbandry systems that are adapted to animal behavior and are future-oriented
• Linking the analysis of hygienic aspects in animal husbandry with modern methods of molecular biology

The research projects in the above-mentioned areas are primarily funded by the Federal Ministry of Agriculture or the Ministry of Agriculture of Lower Saxony or by the EU, and most of the projects are collaborative projects. The TiHo is currently involved in six projects in the funding line European Innovation Partnership "Agricultural Productivity and Sustainability" (EIP-AGRI), which started in 2016.

Furthermore, the research focus has the improvement of animal health in focus, under the aspect of putting prevention in the foreground. This is represented by clinical research at the TiHo. It includes areas such as feed, vaccines, reduction of the use of medicines in the food-producing animal (herd care and individual animal). It also includes research projects on animal health in horses, small animals (dogs, cats), pets (rodents) reptiles or birds.

Another important component of the research focus are the projects already existing at the TiHo on alternative protein sources as food (e.g. insects), which will gain importance in the broader sense of the EU Green Deal program.