USDA finalizes new standards for ground chicken and turkey

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service announced Thursday it had finalized standards to reduce salmonella and campylobacter in chicken and turkey, and updated testing procedures. The changes are aimed at closing several of the inspection gaps examined by FRONTLINE in the 2015 investigation, The Trouble with Chicken.

The USDA has had success in cutting the proportion of whole chickens found with salmonella. Some have called for a plan that seeks to reduce specific strains of bacteria, such as Salmonella Heidelberg. The assumption is that consumers know how to safely prepare poultry without risking under-cooking or cross-contamination. For ground turkey, the maximums are 13.5 percent for salmonella and 1.9 percent for campbylobacter.

For chicken parts, the standards will require Salmonella contamination rates of no more than 15.4 percent and Campylobacter contamination rates of no more than 7.7 percent. They are critical of the standards since they do not declare Salmonella as an adulterant.

Even when companies wash chicken carcasses after slaughter, the USDA has found the bacteria on about a quarter of all cut-up chicken parts heading for supermarket shelves. The new standard has also levied limits for turkey and ground meat products.

Randy Olson, executive director of the Iowa Poultry Association, said the USDA rule reinforces the importance that farmers and processing plants put on food safety.

“These new standards, in combination with greater transparency about poultry companies’ food safety performance and better testing procedures, will help prevent tens of thousands of food-borne illnesses every year”, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement.

Not all experts believe this type of general limit is the way to combat foodborne illness because not all of the more than 2,000 genetic strains of salmonella bacterium will make people sick. Further, the CDC reports current food safety regulations have not reduced the number of illnesses caused by Salmonella since 2000.

“Presence and absence doesn’t tell us enough of a story about how particularly virulent or unsafe eating a contaminated product can be”, Eskin says.

“Unfortunately, these new standards leave an important loophole in place”, the Safe Food Coalition said. As a result, producers are “meeting or exceeding the standards”.

The FSIS predicts that these new standards will prevent an average of 50,000 foodborne illnesses annually.

The changes to testing are significant, according to Karin Hoelzer, an officer in health programs at Pew Charitable Trusts.

A coalition of consumer groups, the Safe Food Coalition, is commending the new standards while calling on the USDA to take a tougher stance overall on the presence of drug-resistant Salmonella in food. Once establishments have completed a full set of testing under the new standards, the agency will also begin posting online which facilities pass, meet or fail the new standards.