Halal Food Authority

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Dairy scientists are the Gregor Mendels of the genomics age, developing new methods for understanding the link between genes and living things, all while quadrupling the average cow’s milk production since your parents were born.

Reuters.

While there are more than 8 million Holstein dairy cows in the United States, there is exactly one bull that has been scientifically calculated to be the very best in the land. He goes by the name of Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie.

Already, Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie has 346 daughters who are on the books and thousands more that will be added to his progeny count when they start producing milk. This is quite a career for a young animal: He was only born in 2004.

There is a reason, of course, that the semen that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie produces has become such a hot commodity in what one artificial-insemination company calls “today’s fast paced cattle semen market.” In January of 2009, before he had a single daughter producing milk, the United States Department of Agriculture took a look at his lineage and more than 50,000 markers on his genome and declared him the best bull in the land. And, three years and 346 milk- and data-providing daughters later, it turns out that they were right.

“When Freddie [as he is known] had no daughter records our equations predicted from his DNA that he would be the best bull,” USDA research geneticist Paul VanRaden emailed me with a detectable hint of pride. “Now he is the best progeny tested bull (as predicted).”

Data-driven predictions are responsible for a massive transformation of America’s dairy cows. While other industries are just catching on to this whole “big data” thing, the animal sciences — and dairy breeding in particular — have been using large amounts of data since long before VanRaden was calculating the outsized genetic impact of the most sought-after bulls with a pencil and paper in the 1980s.

Dairy breeding is perfect for quantitative analysis. Pedigree records have been assiduously kept; relatively easy artificial insemination has helped centralized genetic information in a small number of key bulls since the 1960s; there are a relatively small and easily measurable number of traits — milk production, fat in the milk, protein in the milk, longevity, udder quality — that breeders want to optimize; each cow works for three or four years, which means that farmers invest thousands of dollars into each animal, so it’s worth it to get the best semen money can buy. The economics push breeders to use the genetics.

The bull market (heh) can be reduced to one key statistic, lifetime net merit, though there are many nuances that the single number cannot capture. Net merit denotes the likely additive value of a bull’s genetics. The number is actually denominated in dollars because it is an estimate of how much a bull’s genetic material will likely improve the revenue from a given cow. A very complicated equation weights all of the factors that go into dairy breeding and — voila — you come out with this single number. For example, a bull that could help a cow make an extra 1000 pounds of milk over her lifetime only gets an increase of $1 in net merit while a bull who will help that same cow produce a pound more protein will get $3.41 more in net merit. An increase of a single month of predicted productive life yields $35 more.

When you add it all up, Badger-Fluff Fanny Freddie has a net merit of $792. No other proven sire ranks above $750 and only seven bulls in the country rank above $700. One might assume that this is largely because the bull can help the cows make more milk, but it’s not! While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that’s no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is named Ensenada Taboo Planet-Et. His predicted transmitting ability for milk production is +2323, more than 1100 pounds greater than Freddie. His offspring’s milk will likely containmore protein and fat as well. But his daughters’ productive life would be shorter and their pregnancy rate is lower. And these factors, as well as some traits related to the hypothetical daughters’ size and udder quality, trump Planet’s impressive production stats.

One reason for the change in breeding emphasis is that our cows already produce tremendous amounts of milk relative to their forbears. In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk. At the same time, the number of dairy cows has decreased from a high of 25 million around the end of World War II to fewer than nine million today. This is an indisputable environmental win as fewer cows create less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and require less land.

At the same time, it turns out that cow genomes are more complex than we thought: as milk production amps up, fertility drops. There’s an art to balancing all the traits that go into optimizing a herd.

While we may worry about the use of antibiotics to stimulate animal growth or the use of hormones to increase milk production by up to 25 percent, most of the increase in the pounds of milk an animal puts out over the pastoral days of yore come from the genetic changes that we’ve wrought within these animals. It doesn’t matter how the cow is raised — in an idyllic pasture or a feedlot — either way, the animal of 2012 is not the animal of 1940 or 1980 or even 2000. A group of USDA and University of Minnesota scientists calculated that 22 percent of the genome of Holstein cattle has been altered by human selection over the last 40 years.

In a sense that’s very real, information itself has transformed these animals. The information did not accomplish this feat on its own, of course. All of this technological and scientific change is occurring within the social context of American capitalism. Over the last few decades, the number of dairies has collapsed and the size of herds has increased. These larger operations are factory farms that are built to squeeze inefficiencies out of the system to generate profits. They benefit from economies of scale that allow them to bring in genomic specialists and use more expensive bull semen.

No matter how you apportion the praise or blame, the net effect is the same. Thousands of years of qualitative breeding on family-run farms begat cows producing a few thousand pounds of milk in their lifetimes; a mere 70 years of quantitative breeding optimized to suit corporate imperatives quadrupled what all previous civilization had accomplished. And the crazy thing is, we’re at the cusp of a new era in which genomic data starts to compress the cycle of trait improvement, accelerating our path towards the perfect milk-production machine, also known as the Holstein dairy cow.

There are no more famous experiments in genetics than the ones undertaken by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel on five acres in what is now the Czech Republic from 1856 to 1863. Mendel bred 29,000 pea plants and discovered the most basic rules of genetics without any knowledge of the underlying biochemical mechanics.

Smack dab in the middle of Mendel’s experiments, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, but we don’t have any record of intellectual mingling between the two men. Even the idea of a gene as an irreducible unit of inheritance wasn’t presented until 30 years after Mendel began his experiments. The term and field of genetics would not be fleshed out until William Bateson and company came along in the early 1900s. And its form, DNA, would not be proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick with indispensable help from Rosalind Franklin until 90 years after his last pea plant died. All this to say: Mendel was ahead of his time.

What he had going for him was a dedication to data, to quantification. His fundamental insight was statistical.

Here’s the simple version of what he did. Mendel took pea plants that reliably produced purple or white flowers when they self-pollinated. Then he crossbred them, carefully controlling how the plants reproduced. Now, one might expect that if you breed a pea plant with a purple flower and a pea plant with a white flower, you’d get progeny that were sort of mauve, a mix of the two colors. But what Mendel found instead is that you either got purple flowers or white flowers. Even more amazingly, sometimes breeding two purple flowers would yield a white flower. Among the first generation of crossbreeds, the mix of flower colors occurred at a roughly constant ratio of about 3:1, purple to white. If the traits of two plants were being mixed to generate the next generation, how could two purple flowers yield a white flower? And why would this ratio arise?

Mendel took a conceptual leap and hypothesized that the plants had two possible copies of its plans (i.e. genes) to make flower color (or any of six other traits he analyzed). If the plant received two of the dominant plan (purple), the flowers would, of course, be purple. If it received one of each, the dominant plan would still reign. But if the plant received two recessive plans, then the flowers of that pea would be white.

The monk turned out to be right. For traits controlled by a single gene, things really do work as he predicted. Mendel’s insights became part of the central dogma of genetics. You can use the statistical method he used to calculate how likely someone is to get sickle cell anemia from her parents. In most genetics classes, Mendel is where it all starts and for good reason.

But it turns out that Mendel’s version of things doesn’t actually give a very clear picture of the kinds of things we care about most. “Mendel studied a few traits that happened to be controlled by a single gene, making the probabilities easier to figure out,” the USDA’s VanRaden said. “Animal breeders for many decades have used models that assume most traits are influenced by thousands of genes with very small effects. Some [individual] genes do have detectable effects, but many studies of plant and animal traits conclude that most of the genetic variation is from many little effects.”

For dairy cows — or humans, for that matter — it’s just not as simple as the dominant-recessive single-gene paradigm that Mendel created. In fact, Mendel picked his model organism well. Its simplicity allowed him to focus in on the simplest possible genetic model and figure it out. He could easily manipulate the plant breeding; he could observe key traits of the plant; and these traits happened to be controlled by a single gene, so the math lay within human computational range. Pea plants were perfect for studying the basics of genetics.

With that in mind, allow me to suggest, then, that the dairy farmers of America, and the geneticists who work with them, are the Mendels of the genomic age. That makes the dairy cow the pea plant of this exciting new time in biology. Last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, two of the most successful bulls of all time had their genomes published.

This is a landmark in dairy herd genomics, but it’s most significant as a sign that while genomics remains mostly a curiosity for humans, it’s already coming of age when it comes to cattle. It’s telling that the cutting-edge genomics company Illumina has precisely one applied market: animal science. They make a chip that measures 50,000 markers on the cow genome for attributes that control the economically important functions of those animals.

A snippet from Illumina’s animal science fact sheet.

***

Mendel may have worked with plants, the rules he revealed turned out to be universal for all living things. The same could be true of the statistical rules that dairy scientists are learning about how to match up genomic data with the physical attributes they generate. The statistical rules that reflect the way dozens or hundreds of genes come together to make a cow likely to develop mastitis, say, may be formally similar to the rules that govern what makes people susceptible to schizophrenia or prone to living for a long time. Researchers like the University of Queensland’s Peter Visscher are bringing the lessons of animal science to bear on our favorite animal, ourselves.

Want to live for a very long time? Well, we hope to discover the group of genes that are responsible for longevity. The problem is that you have genomic data over here and you have phenotypic data, i.e. how things actually are, over there. What you need, then, is some way of translating between these two realms. And it’s that matrix, that series of transformations, that animal scientists have been working on for the past decade.

It turned out they were in the perfect spot to look for statistical rules. They had databases of old and new bull semen. They had old and new production data. In essence, it wasn’t that difficult to generate rules for transforming genomic data into real-world predictions. Despite — or because of — the effectiveness of traditional breeding techniques, molecular biology has been applied in the field for years in different ways. Given that breeders were trying to discover bulls’ hidden genetic profiles by evaluating the traits in their offspring that could be measured, it just made sense to start generating direct data about the animals’ genomes.

“Each of the bulls on the sire list, we have 50,000 genetic markers. Most of those, we have 700,000,” the USDA’s VanRaden said. “Every month we get another 12,000 new calves, the DNA readings come in and we send the predictions out. We have a total of 200,000 animals with DNA analysis. That’s why it’s been so easy. We had such a good phenotype file and we had DNA stored on all these bulls.”

They had all that information because for decades, scientists have been taking data from cows to figure out which bulls produced the best offspring. Typically, a bull with a promising pedigree would reach sexual maturity and his semen would be used to impregnate a selection of about 50 test cows. Those daughters would grow up and start producing milk a few years later. The data from those cows would be used to calculate the value of that now “proven” bull. People called the process “progeny testing” and it did not require that breeders knew the exact genetic makeup of a bull. Instead, scientists and breeders could simply say: We do not know the underlying constellations of genes that make this bull so valuable, but we do know how much milk his kids will produce. They learned to use that data to predict who the best bulls were.

That meant that some bulls became incredibly sought after. The number two bull of the last century, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, had more than 16,000 daughters, 500,000 granddaughers, and 2 million great granddaughters. He’s responsible for about 14 percent of all the genetic material in all Holsteins, USDA scientists estimate.

“[In the past], we combined performance data — milk yield, protein yield, confirmation data — with pedigree information, and ran it through a fairly sophisticated computing gobbledygook,” another USDA scientist Curt Van Tassel told a group of dairy farmers. “It spit out at the other end predicted transmitting ability, predicted genetic values of whatever sort. Now what we’re trying to do is tweak that black box by introducing genomic data.”

There are many different ways you could model the mapping of 50,000 genetic markers onto a dozen performance traits, especially when you have to consider all kinds of environmental factors. So the dairy breeders have been developing and testing statistical models to take all this stuff into account and spit out good predictions of which bulls herd managers should ultimately select.The real promise is not that genomic data will actually be better than the ground-truth information generated from real offspring (though it might be), but rather that the estimates will be close enough to real but save 3 to 4 years per generation. If you don’t have to wait for daughters to start cranking out milk, then you can shave those years off the improvement cycle, speeding it up several times.

Nowadays breeders can choose between “genomic bulls,” which have been evaluated based purely on their genes and “proven bulls,” for which real world data is available. Discussions among dairy breeders show that many are beginning to mix in younger bulls with good-looking genomic data into the breeding regimens. How well has it gone? The first of the bulls who were bred from their genetic profiles alone, are receiving their initial production data. So far, it seems as if the genomic estimates were a little high, but more accurate than traditional methods alone.

The unique dataset and success of dairy breeders now has other scientists sniffing around their findings. Leonid Kruglyak, a genomics professor at Princeton, told me that “a lot of the statistical techniques and methodology” that connect phenotype and genotype were developed by animal breeders. In a sense, they are like codebreakers. If you know the rules of encoding. it’s not difficult to put information in one end and have it pop out the other as a code. But if you’re starting with the code, that’s a brutally difficult problem. And it’s the one that diary geneticists have been working on.

Their work could reach outside the medical realm to help us understand human’s evolution as well. For example, Kruglyak said, human population geneticists want to figure out how to explain the remarkable lack of genetic variance between human beings. “The typical [genetic] variation among humans is one change in a thousand,” he said. “Chimps, though they obviously have a much smaller population now, have several fold higher genetic diversity.” How could this be? Researchers hypothesize that human beings once went through a bottleneck where there were very few humans relative both to the current human population and the chimp population. Few humans meant that the gene pool was limited at some point in the pre-historical but fairly recent past. We’ve never recovered the diversity we might have had.

***

The number-one ranked bull in the world. Kathy DeBruin.

It might seem that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie is the pinnacle of the Holstein bull. He’s been the top bull since the day his genetic markers showed up in the USDA database and his real-world performance has backed up his genome’s claims. But he’s far from the best bull that science can imagine.

John Cole, yet another USDA animal improvement scientist, generated an estimate of the perfect bull by choosing the optimal observed genetic sequences and hypothetically combining them. He found that the optimal bull would have a net merit value of $7,515, which absolutely blows any current bull out of the water. In other words, we’re nowhere near creating the perfect milk machine.

The problem, of course, is that genomes cannot really be cut and pasted together from the best bits. “When you go extremely far for one trait, you’re going to upset some of the other traits,” Vanraden said. Breeding is a messy (i.e. biological) process, no matter how technologically sophisticated the front end. After decades of breeding cows for milk production, people realized (to their dismay) that the ability to generate milk and the ability to have babies were negatively correlated. The more milk you tried to order up, the less babies your herd was likely to have. While we’re nowhere near the hypothetical limit for Holstein bull value, we do now know that nature is not so easily transformed without some deleterious effects. We may have factory farms, but these machines are still flesh and blood.

Except for Badger-Fluff Fanny Freddie and his fellow bulls, that is. Freddie is a disembodied creature, an animal that is more important as data than as meat or muscle. Though he’s been mentioned in thousands of web pages and dozens of trade industry articles, no one mentions where he was born or where the animal currently lives. He is, for all intents and purposes except for his own, genetic material that comes in the handy form of semen. His thousands of daughters will never smell him and his physical location doesn’t matter to anyone. He will be replaced very soon by the next top bull, as subject to the pressures of our economic system as the last version of the iPhone.

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Universiti Sains Malaysia dean of the School of Pharmaceutical Sciences Prof Dr Syed Azhar Syed Sulaiman said the committee could ensure that the pharmaceutical industry in the country would be transparent and committed in responding to the needs of Muslim consumers who were sensitive over halal issue.

He said the committee could work closely with monitoring agencies such as the Islamic Development Department (Jakim) in finding ways to resolve the halal issue in the pharmaceutical industry.

“We should be ashamed of ourselves as the halal pharmaceutical industry in the country is still lagging behind that of non-Islamic countries like Thailand and Belgium,” he said.

He was when presenting a paper entitled ‘Halal Medicine in the Pharmaceutical Industry: Steps Towards Production and Empowerment’ at the ‘Halal Food Crisis: Towards a Solution’ seminar here, Wednesday.

– BERNAMA

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By RIYADH: KHALID TAWALBEH ARAB NEWS STAFF

Chief Executive Officer of the Saudi Food and Drug Authority (SFDA) Mohammed bin Ahmed Al-Kanhal has urged the authority’s offices at customs outlets to be careful while examining imported foods, especially shipments of fish from the waters of the Arabian Gulf.

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According to the available information meningitis vaccine earlier produced, contained materials of bovine or porcine origin. Due to this reason Muslims had been complaining against those vaccines and urging for producing completely halal vaccine from halal ingredients. Due to this demand from the Muslim world an ‘apparently halal’ vaccine was produced named Mencevax. It is alleged that Mencevex even used porcine ingredients at manufacturing stage but the finished product could be made porcine free with the blessings of latest scientific technologies. Nevertheless, to say that Bangladesh is still using this ‘apparently halal’ vaccine though completely halal vaccine is available in the market. However, the government is under pressure to use halal vaccine especially for the hajj pilgrims.

The Hajj Agencies Association of Bangladesh (HAAB) has recently forwarded a letter to the ministry of Health and Family Welfare on March 19 and urged the government to take necessary measures to collect halal meningitis vaccines for the hajj pilgrims.

It should be mentioned here that the Saudi government has already approved Menveo as a halal vaccine for its people. The Jakarta Globe reported that Indonesia’s health ministry has halted distribution of Mencevax for those planning the pilgrimage to Makkha, after the Indonesian Council of Ulema passed an edict banning the vaccine, citing the use of porcine enzymes. The health minister said that the country will not use the vaccines already purchased worth US$3.0 million.

Meanwhile, the government of Singapore has seriously been considering the issue as the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS) has also expressed concern over possible problems with the vaccine after clerics in Indonesia declared it haram or forbidden under Islamic law, as pork and pig-derived by-products are prohibited for Muslims.

The Islamic Services of America (ISA) has approved Menveo as a halal vaccine manufactured by Novartis. After visiting Novartis plant based in Italy ISA has issued a certificate mentioning that “there are no additives or processing involving forbidden or suspicious ingredients” in Menveo. The Indonesian Council of Ulamas has also issued halal certificate in favour of Novartis’s Menveo, in July 2010, which is the first conjugate vaccine commercially available in Europe as well, that helps protect meningitis against four major serogroups of Neisseria meningitides A, C, W135 and Y.

European Commission (EC) has also granted a marketing authorisation for Menveo products in all 27 European member states. Menveo was also approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on February 21, 2010.

Menveo vaccine is a conjugate vaccine but the previous one was polysaccharide vaccine that has lots of limitations. It is not effective for infants, it cannot immune memory and cannot ensure prolonged duration of protection. But Menveo vaccine is very much effective for the aforementioned conditions. It not only protects but also prevents the carrier of the germs to spread, among others. The halal vaccine has a boosting effect, and in repeated use it doesn’t lose power rather intensifies it.

According to the Ministry of Hajj of Saudi Arabia 2,927,717 persons performed the holy Hajj in 2011. While Bangladeshi Hajj pilgrims were 1,05,608 in number. This year around 1,20,000 Bangladeshis will perform the Hajj.

Every year millions of people from around 160 countries worldwide gather in Mecca for Umra and hajj. The Hajj has become the epicenter of mass migration of millions of Muslims of enormous ethnic diversity.

No other mass gathering can compare, either in scale or in regularity. communicable disease outbreaks of various infectious diseases have been reported repeatedly during and following the hajj. Therefore, to protect the pilgrims from communicable diseases the Saudi government has made it mandatory for the pilgrims to take meningitis vaccine before arriving at the holy place. During Hajj, carrier rates for meningococcal disease rise to a level as high as 80% due to intense overcrowding, high humidity and dense air pollution (according to www.eurosurveillance.org). It should also be mentioned here that the meningitis belt of Sub-saharan Africa, stretching from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east has the highest rates of the disease.

Therefore, saving life is of foremost important for the host country. Besides, the hajis might not be infected and become a carrier of such communicable diseases is also a great concern. And when there is an issue for haram and halal, the muslims will accept the halal one- no doubt. So, it is expected that the government will also take necessary steps to provide halal conjugate vaccine for this year’s hajj pilgrims.

Md Sazzad Hossain

Dhaka

md.sazzad.hossain@gmail.com

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Abstract: In recent years, Muslims have depended on the Halal logo, displayed on food packaging, to indicate that the products are prepared according to Halal precepts. As laid out in the Quran, Halal designates that which is lawful and permitted. However, due to the rapid development of advanced technology and the stringent procedures legislated by the Department of Islamic Development in Malaysia, manufacturers may sometimes resort to fabricating a fake logo to attract Muslim consumers. This study is focused on validating Halal status for food products by using radio frequency identification technology to enhance existing methods in Malaysia. A preliminary survey was carried out to evaluate the industry’s readiness to implement radio frequency identification technology in Malaysia. A process model and prototype were developed to enhance existing systems. Through this new approach, the authentic Halal logo that is issued by JAKIM can easily be validated, because every stamp that will be embedded into food packages is identified with its own unique identification number. An radio frequency identification reader will be placed in retail venues for consumers to validate their food’s Halal status. User evaluation has been conducted to measure satisfaction in terms of usability, efficiency, security, affordability and profitability. Based on the evaluation, all respondents are satisfied with the performance of this new technology and fully support implementing this system globally, as the Malaysian government is now moving towards becoming the world’s Halal hub.

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By KATHERINA MARIE
educate@thestar.com.my

STEAMED with chilli and garlic, the tilapia fish makes for a delicious meal, but a Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) researcher has discovered that the spiny-finned freshwater fish is a rich source of collagen.

The discovery offers consumers a halal alternative for the important protein, which is traditionally obtained from pigs and cows.

The collagen was discovered by UPM Faculty of Food and Science Technology lecturer and researcher Prof Dr Jamilah Bakar.

She then introduced it to biotech company Bionic Lifesciences, which included the ingredient in its bird’s nest product.

The improved final product was displayed at the Biomalaysia 2011 Conference and Exhibition in Kuala Lumpur recently. Bionic Lifesciences director Prof Mohd Saleh Yahya and UPM deputy vice-chancellor (Research and Innovation) Prof Mohd Saleh Jaafar signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to seal the collaboration between the company and varsity to commercialise the product.

Prof Mohd Saleh said UPM’s objective for the collaboration is to enhance research and development for the biotechnological processes.

“This collaboration will help to provide technical assistance and knowledge and will be beneficial for UPM students to further their research on collagen,” he said.

Prof Jamilah shared that she had spent 12 years on the research.

“I actually started my research with gelatine which is used in almost all the food products and from there, I discovered that gelatine is obtained from collagen by hydrolysis,” she said.

“Collagen is used widely in the food industry as a food supplement in capsule, beverage and tablet forms.

Students and visitors looking at the raw collagen sample and the range of products it could be used for at the signing ceremony.

“Society is starting to realise the importance of collagen in maintaining skin health, improving immunity, activating muscles and treating joint pain,” she said.

She added that prior to this, collagen had to be imported from China and Korea as there was no local source.

“We are the first in the region to produce halal aquatic collagen.

“The cosmetics industry can use it for its anti-ageing properties and include it into facemasks, hair products, nail products, creams and even directly into beverages because it is halal,” she added.

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The new solution will make it easier, faster and more cost effective to provide confidence in the integrity and authenticity of food products for global markets where Halal certification is required. The worldwide market for Halal food products represents $635 billion of the $4 trillion spent annually on food supplies worldwide, with Asian countries accounting for over 60% of that expenditure.

“The intricacies inherent within the global food supply chain make guaranteeing Halal-compliant food products challenging. This new solution for Halal certification testing is the latest example of how we are working to deliver solutions that make it easier for customers to ensure certification of their products,” said Dusty Tenney, president, Analytical Sciences and Laboratory Services, PerkinElmer. “We are also collaborating with partners in several countries that aim to become regional Halal centers of excellence for food processing to provide their consumers with the product integrity assurance they require.”

The Porcine Detection Kits provide Halal-certifying agencies, contract laboratories and food manufacturers with a screening capability alongside existing laboratory-based technologies, providing on-the-spot rapid characterization of food products. The fast and easy-to-use kit can provide a positive or negative screening result for the presence of porcine protein/meat/Immunoglobulin G (IgG) as soon as 15 minutes, through a simple interface and minimal sample preparation allowing for operation by non-technical users.

About PerkinElmer, Inc.

PerkinElmer, Inc. is a global leader focused on improving the health and safety of people and the environment. The Company reported revenue of approximately $1.7 billion in 2010, has about 7,000 employees serving customers in more than 150 countries, and is a component of the S&P 500 Index. Additional information is available through 1-877-PKI-NYSE, or at www.perkinelmer.com .

SOURCE: PerkinElmer, Inc.

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A scientific report entitled ‘The Bleeding of Slaughtered Lambs for the Purposes of Halal Slaughter’ has been released. The document reviews the effect of different slaughter practices on the bleeding of lambs at slaughter.  It makes up part of a postgraduate dissertation submitted by Mr Rizvan Khalid for his MSc in Meat Science and Technology from the University of Bristol.

Mr Khalid has encountered many Islamic scholars raising a plethora of questions in relation to the halal slaughter of animals.  He feels this is an area in which research by Muslims in the field is crucial, as reliable research addressing such questions provides scholars with the knowledge on which to base sound opinions. One such question raised has been in relation to bleeding after slaughter of animals, and whether or not it is compromised by any form of stunning. He decided to make this the focus of his research by studying the impact of electrical head-only stunning of lambs on bleeding.

The research includes a study of relevant Qur’anic ayats and Ahadith from those that Mr Khalid had previously drawn together.  This was conducted alongside continuous discussion with and ongoing review by Islamic scholars.  It is important to note that all Qur’anic verses and Ahadith have been referenced in the report so that they may be critiqued by Islamic scholars.  It is also acknowledged that differences of opinion will nonetheless remain but these must be valid and linked to Islamic scripture.

Mr Khalid believes that scientific knowledge is required alongside religious context before informed discussions can begin. The report is divided into sections including what happens on exsanguination of lamb (the process by which blood is released from the animal), what factors affect this, what Islamic scripture says in relation to blood and what the common conceptions are about blood in meat.

The report can be downloaded here. Any queries in relation to the report can be emailed to rizvan@euroqualitylambs.co.uk.

Biography

Mr Rizvan Khalid is director of Euro Quality Lambs Ltd – a family owned business and the largest Muslim-owned lamb slaughterhouse in Europe.  A Chartered Accountant by profession, he received the Maurice Ingram Memorial Prize – awarded to the student with the highest marks – upon completing his  MSc in Meat Science & Technology from the University of Bristol.  He now actively encourages other Muslims to pursue studies in this field, particularly Islamic scholars, to acquire technical knowledge on the issues that affect Halal meat production.

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