Meat + Poultry - October 2009 - 30

Washington
BY BERNARD SHIRE
meatpoultry@sosland.com

Tightening the screws
When President Obama's Food Safety
Working Group announced this summer a plan to upgrade food safety standards, the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's
Food Safety Assessments (FSA) program had already been in operation
for several years.
Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, Vice President Joe Biden and
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius recommended
a new, public health-focused approach
to food safety based on prioritizing
prevention, strengthening surveillance
and improving response and recovery.
USDA's FSA program, and its
companion program called Intensified Verification Testing, are carried
out in meat and poultry plants by Enforcement, Investigations and Analysis Officers (EIAOs). These are the
successors to the old FSIS compliance
officers, who focused not so much

FSAs and IVTs are great
challenges for meat and
poultry plants, especially
for small ones.
on inspection of food safety in meat
plants, but on making sure plant operators complied with any enforcement
penalties handed down by the agency.
After inspectors found problems
in plants, compliance people were
the investigators and the "enforcers."
And while EIAOs have been billed as
being more scientifically trained and
more willing to assist plant operators,
that close working relationship hasn't
developed, according to many plant
owners. Instead, they've evolved to
a new version of the old compliance
people, and are assigned to do tasks
USDA says its inspectors were not
trained to do.
The purpose of a Food Safety Assessment is to do an extensive investigation of a plant's food-safety system whenever an FSIS sample tests
positive for E. coli O157:H7, Listeria

monocytogenes (generally in ready-toeat products), Salmonella, when an
FSIS sample of raw beef tests positive for E. coli, when another government agency finds any of the above in
a plant, or when a plant's inspectors
document repetitive occurrences of
noncompliance in the establishment's
Lm control program.
Intensified Verification Testing is
a highly increased frequency of sampling in which FSIS tests ready-to-eat
product, food-contact surfaces and environmental surfaces, such as walls
and floors for Listeria, and to verify
whether or not the plant's food-safety
system is adequate.
FSAs and IVTs are great challenges for meat and poultry plants,
especially small ones. More recently,
USDA announced a directive and
notice that it is intensifying both programs to comply with the food safety
group's direction for new safety.
FSIS' directive says the agency
will now put meat and poultry processing and slaughter plants into a
priority level for Food Safety Assessment scheduling based on public health criteria, in addition to traditional event-based scheduling.
Any plant meeting one or more of
the criteria will be visited by USDA
"for cause" FSA. (A 'for cause' FSA
is one prompted by a positive sample result, production and shipment
of adulterated product "or any other high-priority food safety-related
incident," according to the agency).
But according to USDA's "top
priority" listing for Food Safety Assessments, a wide variety and number of plants are likely to receive visits
from USDA. Not only will they include sole suppliers of ground beef or
patties or raw beef components with
a positive E. coli O157:H7 sample,
plants having an FSIS or other government test resulting in a positive
E. coli, Lm or Salmonella sample are
also included. They will also include

30 * Meat&Poultry * October 2009 * www.MeatPoultry.com

plants with a history of health-related
noncompliance records, plants whose
FSIS-regulated products were linked
to human illness, who had positive
Salmonella in heat-treated, not fully
cooked, not shelf-stable poultry products, plants who experienced any kind
of HACCP or sanitation enforcement
action, including an enforcement letter - and plants shipping product that
underwent a Class I or Class II recall.
Also to be included in the top
priority are plants having an FSIS
positive sample of Lm, Salmonella
or E. coli O157:H7 in ready-to-eat
products or a positive Lm food-contact surface sample.
Plants in a slightly lower priority,
but still to receive Food Safety Assessments, include: those tested for
Salmonella that are above standard;
plants changing production processes that in FSIS' view could impact
public health; and plants that experienced consumer complaints about
their products reported through the
Consumer Complaint Monitoring
System. New establishments just
beginning to operate under inspection would also likely receive an FSA.
Outside of these priorities, routine
but comprehensive FSAs for no cause
at all are to be conducted in plants at
least every four years.
These intensifications of FSIS indepth evaluations of plant food-safety
programs will pose new challenges to
meat and poultry slaughtering and
processing plants.
But for very small and small
plants, and even medium-size plants,
the new USDA policies will be more
of a challenge - and are even a greater
threat to their survival. ■
Bernard Shire is M&P's Washington correspondent, based in Lancaster, Pa. With a background
in editing and writing for daily news publications,
he also works as a food safety consultant with
Shire & Associates.
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Meat + Poultry - October 2009

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