000392 Some Contaminated Chickens Pass Inspection

Washington - A study found that one in every 100 chicken carcasses gets past a federal inspector with fecal contamination or signs of disease on it, and federal officials say a new inspection program could reduce that rate.

“While our system is good, it's not perfect,” said Thomas Billy, administrator of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Chicken carcasses are subject to additional cleansing after they pass the inspectors, so all fecal material should be eliminated before the meat reaches consumers, industry officials say.

The study was conducted over the past year at 16 poultry plants that have agreed to take part in the new inspection program.

Under the existing system, federal inspectors sit at fixed points along production lines and have about 2 seconds to check each carcass for defects and contamination as it passes by. Under the new system, that job is being left to company employees. Federal inspectors are being pulled off the production lines to do testing and oversight.

Billy said that will allow inspectors to focus on catching food-safety problems, such as fecal contamination, rather than looking for defects or stray feathers that should be the packing plant's responsibility to find. Inspectors will be doing four times as much sampling for fecal contamination as they do now, as well as testing for dangerous microbes, he said.

Some 306 of the 32,075 carcasses sampled in the study had fecal contamination. Another 43, or 0.1%, had lesions and other signs of poultry diseases that are dangerous to humans.

Consumer advocates generally support the experimental system. But the contamination rate is already low enough that it will be difficult to reduce it, said Caroline Smith DeWaal of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “The data is going to be tough for the industry to beat,” she said.

The plants also were tested for the presence of harmful microbes, including salmonella. About 6% of the chickens sampled were contaminated with salmonella. The federal limit is 20% and the national average is about 10%, DeWaal said.

Additional testing will be done at the plants to see how they performing under the new system. The first such data is expected to be available in June or July.

The American Federation of Government Employees, which represents 7,000 inspectors, unsuccessfully sued USDA to stop the new inspection program, claiming that a 1907 law requires that the agency physically examine every meat and poultry carcass.

The union says the department essentially is allowing companies to police themselves. The program started last fall at a plant in Alabama and other facilities are being phased in over time.

In addition to the 16 chicken plants, the program is being started at five plants that slaughter hogs and three that process turkeys.

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