Washington - The number of uncooked U.S. chickens contaminated with salmonella has been cut by nearly half in the past six months, the U.S. Agriculture Department said.
According to the USDA's latest analysis of the largest meat and poultry plants, the rate of broiler chickens infected with the bacteria dropped from 20% to about 10.4%.
The drop was registered after the USDA launched new rules in January for big processing plants to take preventive measures to limit food contamination and to conduct routine salmonella tests.
The procedure will be rolled out among smaller meat and poultry plants next year, and is also being adopted for other foods such as seafood.
Salmonella, a bacteria that can cause severe cramps and diarrhea, has been linked to as many as 3.8 million illnesses annually in the United States. It also has cost the economy billions of dollars in lost work and medical costs.
The USDA report also showed pig carcasses contaminated with salmonella fell from 8.7% to about 5.5%. There was "insufficient data" for the past six months on other categories of meat such as ground beef and ground turkey, the USDA said.
The results also indicated that 88% of the largest U.S. meat and poultry plants met salmonella test standards required by the USDA under its new meat inspection rules.
Consumer groups said the apparent drop in salmonella rates was important, but criticized USDA for failing to address a more common -- although lesser known -- food-borne disease called campylobacter. It causes symptoms similar to those produced by salmonella, including nausea and diarrhea.
"USDA is really only looking at one of the major pathogen problems with poultry," said Caroline Smith DeWaal, director of food safety for Center for Science in the Public Interest. "We also need to look at how campylobacter is being affected, and we won't know that until USDA requires campylobacter testing."
Last week, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 8 million Americans were sickened by food poisoning in 1997, mostly from campylobacter. Even a single drop of juice from raw chicken meat can infect a person, the CDC said.
Salmonella was the second most common bacteria found in food poisoning cases last year, the CDC data showed.
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