Industry News

FSIS Announces New Multi-Residue Testing

The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has announced that, later this summer, it will launch a new approach to its testing to protect the public from exposure to harmful levels of chemical residues in meat, poultry, and egg products. 

“The new testing methods being announced today will help protect consumers from illegal drug residues in meat products,” said USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety Dr. Elisabeth Hagen. “By allowing us to test for more chemical compounds from each sample, these changes will enable USDA to identify and evaluate illegal drug residues more effectively and efficiently.” 

Through its National Residue Program (NRP), FSIS tests for the presence of chemical compounds, including approved (legal) and unapproved (illegal) veterinary drugs, pesticides, hormones, and environmental contaminants that may appear in meat, poultry, and egg products.

One of the new multi-residue methods will allow screening for chemical compounds that include several types of drugs such as antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, and growth promoters. In the past, FSIS would have collected 300 samples from 300 cows and looked for one chemical at a time. Under the new system, one sample may be tested for as many as 55 pesticide chemicals, nine kinds of antibiotics, various metals, and eventually more than 50 other chemicals. In all, FSIS will assess more compounds per sample using several multi-residue methods. 

FSIS is also revamping its scheduled sampling program to increase the annual number of samples per slaughter class from 300 to 800. If an establishment has samples containing illegal residue levels, FSIS will notify the FDA, which may review practices of producers supplying the establishment with livestock or poultry, and FSIS may subject the establishment to increased testing and review.
 

GFSI and TAFS Join Forces

The Global Food Safety Initiative (GFSI) and the Swiss based TAFS forum have announced their future collaboration on animal health and food safety issues. The TAFS forum and GFSI recently signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to support their joint efforts for the continuous improvement of food safety throughout the global food supply chain.

“With the prospect of nine billion people to feed in 2050 and a particularly strong increase in the demand for animal-based protein such as meat, milk, and eggs, the efficiency of food production needs to be optimized and losses reduced wherever possible,” said Ulrich Kihm, president of the TAFS forum Board. “Animal diseases represent a major source of food losses, besides being a potential hazard to food safety. Working hand in hand with the GFSI will assure enhanced collaboration between all stakeholders.”

Both the TAFS forum and GFSI consider animal health as a prerequisite for food safety and will team up to address these issues together. GFSI is primarily active in the domain of risk management by benchmarking and recognizing existing food safety management schemes. The TAFS forum is focused on risk assessment and risk communication in the field of livestock diseases that are transmissible to humans through food and other pathways.