010624 USDA Chicken Inspection System to Go National

Washington - The Agriculture Department plans to go nationwide with a disputed inspection system for chicken processors that federal officials say has resulted in lower rates of disease and fecal contamination on the meat.

USDA's inspectors' union is challenging the experimental system in court, claiming the old system is safer, but department officials said that the project has worked so well in 13 plants that it should be implemented in all facilities. There about 200 nationwide.

Under the program, the inspectors no longer do hands-on checks of chicken carcasses, leaving that to company employees. The inspectors instead concentrate on verifying that the plants' sanitation systems are working properly by testing samples and visually checking the carcasses.

In the test plants, the percentage of chicken carcasses found contaminated with fecal material has dropped from 1.5% to 0.1%, according to USDA data. The number of chickens with diseases that pose a human health hazard has dropped from 0.1% to 0.001%.

“If the testing data continue to show that, it's a great improvement,” said Margaret Glavin, associate administrator of USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Chickens are cleaner under the new system because the inspectors are more likely to catch problems as the chickens are being processed, the department says.

She told a USDA advisory committee that the agency planned to propose rules by the end of the year to expand the system to all chicken plants. It could take another year for the rules to become final, she said.

The inspectors union sued to stop the project, which started in 1999, arguing that inspectors were required by law to manually inspect every chicken. The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia later agreed that USDA had to keep inspectors on production lines. USDA now has inspectors checking the carcasses visually, but not by hand.

The lawsuit remains on appeal.

Felicia Nestor of the Government Accountability Project, an activist group that has been critical of the new inspection system, said USDA shouldn't expand it unless the department's results are confirmed by an independent testing firm, Research Triangle Institute, that is doing its own analysis.

“There's no way that anyone can consider it in good faith until we've seen some data,” she said.

There also should be job protection for workers who report problems in chicken plants, said Carol Tucker Foreman, director of the director of the Consumer Federation of America's Food Policy Institute.

Foreman, a member of the USDA advisory committee, also raised concerns that USDA inspectors could be missing fecal contamination that isn't visible on the outside of the chicken carcasses.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is currently reviewing the program.

The 13 plants that are part of the program are located in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Virginia. The system also is being tested by hog processors in Minnesota, Nebraska and Pennsylvania.

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