 000765 Glickman Trusts Meat InspectionJuly 26, 2000 Washington - Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman expressed confidence in an experimental meat inspection system despite an appellate court's ruling that it illegally gave too much responsibility to processors. ``We certainly don't want to give up on it. We think it has a great opportunity to improve food safety,'' Glickman said Under the new system, USDA inspectors are leaving it to plant employees to do the traditional poke-and-sniff method of inspecting animal carcasses and are instead doing more testing for microbes and sampling for fecal contamination. The inspectors union sued to stop the project, and a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia agreed last month that USDA inspectors are required by law to do hands-on checks of animal carcasses. USDA officials say that's a waste of their inspectors' time because harmful microbes can't be detected by sight. Glickman said the administration had not decided how to respond to the ruling. ``The fact of the matter is that the seeing, smelling, sniffing and poking system is not the exclusive way that we ought to do food safety in the future ... You can't catch E. coli, listeria or salmonella by doing that alone,'' he said. The union says USDA is allowing the industry to police itself. Glickman said the department needed to ``do a better job of communicating'' with its inspectors. Test results from seven poultry plants now using the system indicated that rates of disease, fecal contamination and salmonella are down on average, USDA says. Results from nine additional plants are due later this year. ``There's no way we would take USDA's word for it until we looked behind the data,'' said Felicia Nestor of the Government Accountability Project, an advocacy group that supports the union.
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