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Healthy Milk: Key components of milk hygiene from farm to consumer

Food security is an important issue related to public health and dairy products are a major part of human diet. Low consumption is linked with many health defects. Turkey ranks lowest milk consumer per capita among EU countries. Therefore, increasing milk production and consumption is a primary goal. However, increasing alone will not be adequate since milk production in Turkey hampered with low hygiene. As stated in the 9th development program of Turkey, an increase in hygienic milk production and coordinated efforts among several sectors including health, labor, and education is required to achieve that goal. Starting as early as 1980s, EU focused on hygiene in dairy. In 1998, EU implemented a regulation that specifies the milk hygiene prior to marketing. The main regulations in the Turkish side were declared in 2000, but are not widely implemented. The improvement of the raw milk quality and the synchronization of Turkish standards with EU milk quality standards is therefore a major goal for the prospective integration of Turkey into the EU as well as for increasing the competitiveness of the Turkish dairy sector. Such a perspective will inescapably require an urgent need to standardize training of Turkish dairy industry staff in regard to hygiene and eventually food safety in parallel to European counterparts.To be an extended version of the previous project, we intent to conduct an in-depth analysis of hygiene in Turkish milk production chain-from farm operations to marketing- and subsequently develop and implement a multimedia training package for distance learning. The target audiences will range from farmers to milk producers, industry staff, and trainers. The main products that are include (i) an inventory of available hygiene models and reference training material from Turkish milk production industry and a comparison between Turkish and EU models, (ii) core curricula for the appropriate training of personnel at the farm and various levels in industry, (iii) two multimedia training packages - Primary and Industry sectors, which include distance learning (Internet), The course will be fully available in Turkish, English. Overall, these results would contribute to development of new qualifications or upskilling pre-existent ones, establishment of common standards.

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