University of Veterinary Medicine Budapest

Food hygiene was a part of the curriculum already from the very beginings of the Hungarian veterinary education. Tolnay Sándor elaborated and included the meat inspection aspects into the curriculum of the Veterinary School that was established in 1787 within the Medical Faculty of University of Pest. The Third International Veterinary Congress (1867) was an important step in the education of meat hygiene. The main topic of the Congress was the public meat inspection. Following this event, the education of meat hygiene became gradually more and more important. From 1875, Zlamál Vilmos lectured the medical-police meat inspection in framework of epidemiology while Hutyra Ferenc (1888) already performed it as a separate discipline as a part of the medical science. At this time the slughterhouse parctices were introduced and later from the end of the first decade of the 20th Century, the education of milk hygiene was also initiated and from this time the regular education and practice of the two main disciplines of food hygiene (meat hygiene and milk hygiene) have become continuous. This was the merit first of all of Breuer Albert, Fettick Ottó and Semsey Géza but the activity in education of Kazár Gyula (1934-), Szepeshelyi Andor (1946-), Méhes György (1946-) and Nyiredy István (1947-) must also be mentioned.

An important corner stone in the education of food hygiene was the separate University Department established by Csiszár Vilmos in 1949. Csiszár Vilmos was lecturer while worked at the Debrecen Municipal Slaughterhouse Service, at the Agriculture Academy of Debrecen (1943-), later at the Debrecen Department of the Agriculture University (1946-). In 1949, he was charged by the organization of the University Department at Budapest and became professor in 1950. The work of Takács János was short but very significant in the history of the Department. Already before his professorial appointment in 1976, he was an internationally known respected scientist in the field of food hygiene while he was the head of the microbiological laboratory at an important, central slaughterhouse, later he was the director of the Official Veterinary Control Service of Meat Indsutry and correspondingly, member and officer of several domestic and international scientific associations. His internationally acknowledged activity extended to the development of microbiological examinations and he organized the Hungarian network of slaughterhouse laboratories. After his death at 1979, Bíró Géza became the head of Department (1980). The textbook entitled Food-hygiene (1993, 1999). written by professor Bíró through close to 15 years served the graduate students and the practicizing food hygienist veterinarians. The initiation of the post-graduate course of the veterinarian food hygiene specialists was in 1983 and after 1990, 1998, 2002, participants of the fifth curse obtained their diplome. An important pofessional event was in the history of the Department that the Wold Association of Veterinary Food Hygienists held its congress at Budapest (1985). From the participants, almost a 100 membered group of teachers were the guest of the Department&University. Following the era of Bíró Géza, Sas Barnabás became professor and the head of the Department. After the return of professor Sas to the National Institute of Food Investigation, professor Laczay Péter from the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology was appointed to be the leader of the Department.

In 2000, a modern, well-equiped food-toxicological laboratory was established at the Department that opened possibility for initiating chemical-toxicological, food safety research. The laboratory possesses GLP qualification. The traditional microbiological activity of the Department was greatly improved by the modernization/remodelling of the microbiological laboratory and its accrediation by the National Accreditation Body (2001) furthermore, by the establishment of the microbiological research laboratory.