Will New Standards for Salmonella in Chicken Cut Down on Food Poisoning? - Civil Eats

FSIS plans to publish the rule detailing the new regulations in the federal register in October, when industry representatives, advocates, and anyone else who wants to will have a chance to comment before it's finalized. "We are very mindful that this is a different approach than we've taken in the past," Eskin said. "We want to give all stakeholders a chance to weigh in . . . to make sure that the policy we finalize is the best one."

Another way FSIS could shape enforceable product standards that work for companies and consumers alike, advocates say, is to focus on the most dangerous types of salmonella—an approach that Eskin spoke at length about considering.

While about 2,500 different serotypes of salmonella exist, just a handful account for the majority of illnesses. Other prevalent varieties are seen as relatively harmless. "Salmonella Kentucky is one of the most commonly found serotypes on poultry in slaughter plants and sampling from carcasses and parts, and that serotype really doesn't cause that many human illnesses," explained James Kincheloe, an agricultural veterinarian who is now the food safety campaign manager at CSPI. "We need to be more specific."

FSIS is not currently testing for serotypes, but Eskin said they are considering it. "The tests that we've used historically have [answered the question]: is it contaminated or not? The problem is that it doesn't provide any focus on what has the biggest public health impact," she said. She noted that one criticism of focusing on serotypes is that it can lead to a game of whack-a-mole: When one dangerous serotype is controlled, another may pop up to take its place.

Eskin said FSIS has also started using testing that allows inspectors to quantify the amount of salmonella found. That could feed into a new standard that is more specific about how much of a certain type of salmonella is allowed on any given product, since a higher volume makes it much more likely that the bacteria will get someone sick.

One criticism of focusing on serotypes is that it can lead to a game of whack-a-mole: When one dangerous serotype is controlled, another may pop up to take its place.

Everyone Civil Eats spoke with expects industry pushback to new product safety standards, but Kincheloe said poultry companies might not fight the standards in the same way they have against other kinds of regulations. Last year, Butterball, Perdue Farms, Tyson Foods, and Wayne Farms all signed on to join the Coalition for Poultry Safety Reform alongside CSPI and other consumer and patient advocacy groups. "This cooperation is unprecedented," he said. "There likely will be protests from trade groups or specific segments of the poultry industry, but there are large players who are for making substantial changes to the system."

However, in response to FSIS' announcement that it would label salmonella an adulterant in breaded and stuffed products, the National Chicken Council put out a statement calling the plan "not science-based or data-driven" and claimed that the decision had "the potential to shutter processing plants, cost jobs, and take safe food and convenient products off shelves."

The Council is the loudest voice in the chicken industry, and while it does acknowledge salmonella as a pressing challenge, it says the industry is already spending millions of dollars annually to reduce contamination of a bacteria that occurs naturally in chicken. "There is no single most effective way to reduce salmonella. And there is no silver bullet or one-size-fits all approach to food safety, which is why we employ a multi-hurdle, multi-stage strategy,"

National Chicken Council spokesperson Tom Super told Civil Eats in an email. "The industry addresses salmonella through all stages of the process—from breeders to the feed mill to the farm to the processing plant and through transportation of the product."

Back to Breeding and the Farms

Those earlier stages of the process are critical, and it's the other place in the supply chain where advocates see regulatory loopholes. "What's the best way to control these types of salmonella?" Kincheloe asked. "It's in the live birds."

Recent research has shown common salmonella strains can start as far back as the breeding hens that lay the eggs that become the chickens we eventually eat, spreading across the industry from there. And countries that have attacked the problem closer to its root have come close to eliminating it entirely.

According to a 2019 Pew analysis, governments in Sweden, Norway, and Finland all implemented strict requirements around cleaning chicken housing, on-farm testing in animals and feed, and culling infected breeding animals. They later found salmonella in less than 1 percent of the chickens they tested. In the United Kingdom, an industry-led effort to vaccinate laying hens and the parents of chickens being raised for meat was linked to a nearly 70 percent decline in illness caused by salmonella between the mid '90s, when vaccination began, and 2010.

Advocates like Teresa Murray, the consumer watchdog for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), say vaccine requirements could be put in place for the most dangerous serotypes, and there's some evidence that could make a difference. After a large outbreak of a type called salmonella Heidelberg in Foster Farms chicken in 2013, multiple producers began vaccinating parent chickens in addition to requiring chicks to be free of the type. Illnesses linked to that type fell dramatically over the next five years.

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