000659 USDA: More Testing Needed to Protect Consumers

Washington - The US Department of Agriculture's food safety agency needs to expand laboratory tests and tighten other rules for meat and poultry plants to protect American consumers from food-borne disease, according to a US government investigation.

In its analysis of the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service's four-year- old effort to modernize inspection procedures, the USDA Office of Inspector General said regulators needed to improve monitoring of plants and food-borne illness testing techniques.

The report comes at a crucial time for the USDA food safety agency, which last month lost a key court challenge of its tests for food-borne disease in meat and poultry plants.

In that case, a Texas federal judge ruled that the USDA could not close Supreme Beef Processors Inc.'s hamburger plant after it flunked a series of salmonella contamination tests. The court said it was unfair for the USDA to determine a plant's overall cleanliness based on tests showing food-borne disease in some products.

The USDA is expected to appeal the case.

Investigators with the Office of Inspector General, an independent arm of the USDA, raised general questions in the new report about the way food safety testing is conducted.

The food safety agency used faulty salmonella test kits in some instances, the inspector general report said. The USDA also failed to document test procedures to make sure they were performed properly and that results were accurate, it said.

The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) should test products at all meat and poultry plants, and make sure USDA inspectors have the scientific training to perform them, the report said.

The report also said the agency should expand its own testing requirements for E. coli, Listeria, Salmonella and other food-borne diseases such as Campylobacter. All can be deadly for vulnerable consumers such as the elderly, the very young and those with chronic diseases such as AIDS or cancer. “We found that FSIS needs to command a more aggressive presence in the inspection and verification process,” the report said.

“FSIS has not always established needed procedures or apprised itself of all areas where inspection is critical, consequently it has reduced its oversight short of what is prudent and necessary for the protection of the consumer,” it added. Regulators should “act more aggressively” against meat and poultry plants that repeatedly violate inspection laws, the report said.

The USDA should also tighten its rules for determining if a foreign meat or poultry plant has “equivalent” food safety procedures to a US plant and is qualified to ship products to American consumers, the report said.

The 400-page report offered a mixed report card on the USDA's move away from the traditional “scratch and sniff” inspection methods at meat and poultry plants to more scientific ones.

In 1996, the USDA adopted a so-called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point program which requires plant owners to devise a series of scientific checkpoints to prevent food-borne disease. The procedures are verified in several ways, including tests for contamination.

While industry and consumer groups have generally welcomed the new approach to food safety, both say there is plenty of room for improvement.

But more testing may not be the answer, said Jenny Scott, senior food safety director for the National Food Processors Association.

“To assume that you can find problems by routine pathogen testing is a false sense of security,” Scott said. “You have much better control by having processing procedures in place and verifying that they are working.”

In a letter to the Office of Inspector General, the food safety agency said it agreed with the recommendation to expand testing for food-borne illnesses to all meat and poultry plants. The agency said it was continuing to make improvements and to ensure that federal meat inspectors followed through on testing and scientific procedures.

“The FSIS laboratories do correctly perform the vast majority of check sample analyses as part of a rigorous testing program,” the agency said in a letter to the inspector general, which was included in the new report.

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