USDA Proposes Tougher Food Safety Standards for Chicken and Turkey

From USDA:

Posted by Al Almanza, USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Food Safety, on January 21, 2015 at 2:00 PM

The graphic above illustrates how proposed new federal standards could help reduce poultry-related Salmonella illnesses by an estimated 50,000 each year. Click to enlarge.

It’s no secret that Americans eat a lot of chicken and turkey. In fact, USDA estimates that a single American will eat 102 pounds of poultry in 2015. It is USDA’s job to ensure the meat and poultry products we enjoy are also safe to eat, and that means adapting federal food safety regulations to meet changes in production technology, scientific understanding of foodborne illness, and consumer demand.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, over 1 million Americans contract foodborne Salmonella poisoning each year, and 200,000 of those illnesses can be attributed to poultry. Today, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service proposed new food safety standards that would reduce Salmonella and Campylobacter, another common cause of foodborne illness, on ground chicken and turkey, as well as chicken legs, breasts and wings, which represent the majority of poultry items that Americans purchase and feed their families.

By taking specific aim at lowering contamination on these products, an estimated 50,000 cases of foodborne illness could be averted annually.

Since 1996, FSIS has used pathogen reduction performance standards to measure the food safety performance of meat and poultry businesses.  With this proposal, FSIS would make the performance standards for ground poultry tougher to meet, which would reduce Salmonella and Campylobacter levels on ground poultry nationwide. FSIS implemented performance standards for whole chickens in 1996 but has since learned that Salmonella contamination levels increase as chicken is further processed into parts. By creating a first-time-ever standard for chicken parts, and by performing regulatory testing at a point closer to the final product, FSIS can greatly reduce consumer exposure to Salmonella and Campylobacter.

In addition, FSIS is proposing to be more strategic in the way we schedule microbial tests for Salmonella and Campylobacter at poultry facilities so we can gain a better picture of the food safety realities from business to business. Currently, we schedule a “set” of 52 samples at a facility, which are taken on consecutive days once the set is started. Facilities are categorized according to the number of samples that test positive in their set. Some retailers will only purchase chicken from the top category, so companies are motivated to be among those performers who meet or do better than the national performance standard. By stretching a sample set out over the course of a year so that samples are not collected on consecutive days, and by not alerting the company that the sample will be collected, results will be less affected by intermittent seasonal or production changes, and it will take longer for a company to move from a lower to a higher category. This should prompt companies to take meaningful steps that have a long lasting impact on the safety of their products.

The steps we are proposing are major pieces of FSIS’ Salmonella Action Plan, which the agency developed and released in 2013 to reduce Salmonella illnesses from meat, beef and pork. Collectively, these three foods contribute to about one third of all Salmonella illnesses, and FSIS aims to significantly reduce that number to meet the U.S. government’s Healthy People 2020 goals.

Full Disclosure: Changes to Poultry Inspections Needed to Protect Public Health

USDA Blog Post:

Posted by Al Almanza, Administrator, USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, on September 4, 2013 at 10:18 AM

Cross posted from Food Safety News:

For the past 15 years, USDA conducted a pilot project to inform how we modernize our inspection process – all to ensure that meat and poultry is safe to eat. Today, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), released a report on the project, known as the HACCP-Based Inspection Models Project (HIMP), and how FSIS has relied on it to propose a modernized approach to inspecting poultry.

While an initial scan of the press coverage may lead you to believe that GAO discredits this proposal, that is not the case. GAO gave HIMP a thorough review and made just two recommendations, both of which FSIS is already working to fulfill.

GAO chose not to include some facts that also deserve public disclosure. FSIS put forward this proposal because data shows that a system like HIMP will prevent at least 5,000 more foodborne illnesses annually. The study that FSIS has conducted of HIMP provides an appropriate basis on which to judge the merits of this system. Approximately 10 years ago, FSIS asked an independent group of experts in poultry microbiology, statistical evaluation, poultry food safety and public health to evaluate our study.

These experts supported FSIS’ study design and found that that our approach was valid. But GAO’s report does not mention this food safety conclusion.

GAO’s report also assumes that the basis for moving forward with this proposal is to improve efficiency and save taxpayer dollars. Although it does accomplish both of those things, as FSIS made clear to GAO, this proposal is first and foremost about making food safer. As an agency responsible above all for protecting consumers from foodborne illness, we are obligated to ensure a more modern and better system at hand. In other words GAO did not evaluate this from a public health angle – Rates of illness caused by Salmonella and Campylobacter have been stagnant, even showing occasional rises, in recent years. We must reverse this trend, and if we are to do so, one thing is clear: we cannot continue inspecting poultry the way we have been for over 50 years.

Here is what the data tells us:

• Under the HIMP, FSIS inspectors complete more inspection tasks “off the line” that verify that the plants they work in continuously satisfy food safety performance standards.
• Fecal material, the primary avenue for pathogen contamination, appears about half as often in HIMP establishments as it does in non-HIMP establishments. HIMP establishments are also checked four times more often for fecal material by FSIS inspectors as are non HIMP establishments.
• The average positive rate for Salmonella in HIMP establishments is 20% lower than the average positive rate in non-pilot establishments.

If finalized and implemented broadly, this new inspection system would enable FSIS to better fulfill our food safety mission. Nothing in the GAO’s report contradicts this basic fact.