Source: Tom Johnston, MEATINGPLACE, 4/17/15

Failure to decrease salmonella sickness in the United States is prompting USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service to take a closer look at how it can help reduce contamination in meat and poultry, which for the makers of those products should be a serious concern, a regulatory expert said.

From the issue of whether it will be deemed an adulterant in raw product to improving sampling technology, “Salmonella is the scary topic” for packers and processors, Barb Masters, senior policy director at Washington D.C.-based OFW Law told attendees here at the North American Meat Institute’s Meat Industry Management Conference.

Masters, a former FSIS administrator, said that salmonella is not an adulterant in raw product “perse.” However, there is a live petition asking the agency to deem certain serotypes adulterants in all meat and poultry products. Meanwhile, a federal register notice suggests that if the agency ties an outbreak of salmonellosis to poultry, the agency will consider the strain of salmonella an adulterant in the plant that produced the product, Masters noted.

“[FSIS has] only done that one time that I’m aware of, and that facility was obligated to do their own serotype testing and take that product into ready to eat product or to a lethality step for about three years,” she said. “This is onerous, folks. So if this petition is passed, that’s the level of difficulty we’re talking about.”

Masters’ update comes a year after FSIS announced its Salmonella Action Plan, which requires all plants to incorporate a written program to control contamination from enteric pathogens and fecal matter throughout the entire slaughter and dressing operation (process control) and a microbial sampling program to verify the effectiveness of the written procedures.

Performance standards
Proposed poultry performance standards [http://www.meatingplace.com/Industry/News/Details/55830] expected to go into effect soon, meanwhile, likely will come with follow-up sampling (16 or 8 depending on plant size), and food safety audits (FSAs) for plants not meeting them, Masters said, noting enforcement action will be based on those FSAs.

FSIS will announce all category 1, category 2 and category 3 facilities, and because the agency is moving to a “moving window” sampling plan (starting May 1) to get more consistent sampling through the year, processors can expect more plants to fall into the category 2 and category 3 levels due to seasonal variations, she said.

Indications are that implementation of poultry slaughter modernization will happen later this year, she noted.

For pork, FSIS is initiating an exploratory sampling program to determine prevalence and update pork salmonella performance standards, and in beef the agency continues to study how lymph nodes contribute to contamination in ground beef.

However, the agency isn’t just looking at sanitary dressing procedures to solve problems at the plant level. FSIS is developing a new draft guidance document including pre-harvest interventions (direct-fed microbials, for example) that can be expected to apply to all species, Masters said, noting that while the agency doesn’t oversee production practices it will lean on processors to manage their supply.

Meanwhile, federal agencies are getting better at finding salmonella. The future, Masters said, is whole genome sequencing, which broadens the ability to find culprit pathogens. FSIS, CDC and FDA are working on how, when and where to use it. FDA already has used it in issuing a recall caused by listeria, she said.

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