New Food Safety Actions Likely To Impact Meat Processors By August

The new food safety actions the White House announced last Wednesday are likely to impact beef processors as soon as August. 

NAMP urges every beef processor to attend the E. coli Conference, Aug. 18 – 19, near Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, to hear directly from Dr. Ken Petersen and Dr. Dan Engeljohn of USDA about how the new actions will impact operations. Register now at www.NAMP.com.

Last Wednesday, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, Chair of the Middle Class Task Force, along with Food Safety Task Force Chairs U.S. Health & Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary Tom Vilsack, announced the findings of the working group. A few of the key Executive Branch actions include:

By the end of July, FSIS will issue improved instructions to its workforce on how to verify that establishments that handle beef are acting to reduce the presence of E. coli, and  increase its sampling to find E. coli, focusing largely on the components that go into making ground beef.

By the end of the year, FSIS will develop new standards to reduce the prevalence of Salmonella in turkeys and poultry. The agency also will establish a Salmonella verification program with the goal of having 90 percent of poultry establishments meeting the new standards by the end of 2010.

Within three months, FDA will issue draft guidance on steps the food industry can take to establish product tracing systems to improve the national capacity for detecting the origins of foodborne illness, and federal agencies will implement a new incident command system to address outbreaks of foodborne illness and facilitate communication and decision-making in an emergency.

For the full story, go to http://www.NAMP.com.