FOOD SAFETY GETTING STRICT WITH Salmonella Sandra Eskin on the FSIS' decision to declare Salmonella an adulterant in certain poultry products BY RYAN MCCARTHY | rmccar thy@sos land.com A new declaration by the US Department of Agriculture's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) recently stated that Salmonella would be designated as an adulterant in breaded and stuffed raw chicken products. But even before that declaration, the agency had signaled in October 2021 that it wanted to start a new effort to reduce Salmonella illnesses linked 30 MEAT+POULTRY | 09.22 | www.meatpoultry.com with poultry items. Breaded and stuffed raw chicken products will be declared as adulterated when the products exceed a very low level of Salmonella contamination and would be subject to regulatory action by the agency. Around the time of the proposed change in the FSIS policy Sandra Eskin, USDA deputy undersecretary for food safety, described some of the reasoning for focusing specifically on this category of poultry products. " The problem has been that even though our testing has shown reductions in contamination of raw poultry products we see no commensurate reduction in illnesses, which suggests that maybe we need to rethink how we're regulating, " Eskin said. " We are in the process of considering a number of nataliia - stock.adobe.comhttp://www.meatpoultry.com