Source:  Lisa M. Keefe, MEATINGPLACE.COM, 4/28/11

Meat industry organizations on Thursday responded to a report published by the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida on the riskiest food-pathogen combinations and their public health costs. 

The National Chicken Council released a statement that emphasized the reductions in pathogens that have been achieved by poultry processors, and the fact that most processing plants already meet the new standards for salmonella and campylobacter recently released by USDA. “The microbiological profile of fresh chicken meat is the best that it has ever been,” the statement said.

The American Meat Institute pointed out the relatively weak data underlying the report's conclusions, saying in a statement, "A report from the University of Florida is a novel new analysis of food safety, but highlights an area that should be strengthened: our lack of data that clearly identifies which foods cause foodborne illnesses."

"The University of Florida researchers note that this is a weakness of their report. ... Given this lack of clear attribution data, the researchers were forced to make many assumptions about which foods causes various foodborne illnesses and they layer additional assumptions about the costs of those illnesses upon them," AMI's statement said.

AMI also notes that federal data points to dramatic declines in pathogen contamination over the year.
Researchers at the University of Florida Emerging Pathogens Institute’s report, “Ranking the Risks: The 10 Pathogen-Food Combinations with the Greatest Burden on Public Health,” lists the number of illnesses, costs and overall public health burden of specific microbes in particular types of food. They include:

• Campylobacter in poultry — costs $1.3 billion a year
• Toxoplasma in pork — costs $1.2 billion a year
• Listeria in deli meats — costs $1.1 billion a year
• Salmonella in poultry — costs $700 million a year
• Listeria in dairy products — costs $700 million a year
• Salmonella in complex foods — costs $600 million a year
• Norovirus in complex foods — costs $900 million a year
• Salmonella in produce — costs $500 million a year
• Toxoplasma in beef — costs $700 million a year
• Salmonella in eggs — costs $400 million a year

“The number of hazards and scale of the food system make for a critical challenge for consumers and government alike,” said Michael Batz, lead author of the report and head of Food Safety Programs at the Emerging Pathogens Institute. “If we don’t identify which pairs of foods and microbes present the greatest burden, we’ll waste time and resources and put even more people at risk.”

For more stories, go to www.meatingplace.com.