The USDA has concluded that current poultry food safety guidelines for Salmonella, the leading cause of foodborne illness outbreaks, are inadequate. A new study conducted by Thomas Oscar at the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service, explored additional factors that must be considered in order to deem poultry products safe for human consumption.
The current approach to food safety in the poultry industry consists of two pillars: pathogen reduction and process control to reduce consumer exposure to these harmful pathogens; and active surveillance to identify foodborne illness outbreaks with subsequent recalls of implicated foods.
These approaches are limited because pathogen prevalence is not the only risk factor for an outbreak and in the second pillar, harm to public health occurs before corrective action is taken.
The study concluded that to increase food safety, a process risk model or computer model should be applied at the processing plant exit to integrate pathogen contamination data and post-processing risk factors to provide an objective description regarding the safety of individual lots of food before they are shipped to consumers.
Related: Peaches Recall Expands Globally; CDC: Bagged Peaches Likely Source of Salmonella Outbreak.
from Specialty Food News https://ift.tt/2YRv76c
No comments: