New Performance Standards for Pathogens Part 2

New Performance Standards for Pathogens Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. Two pathogens, salmonella and campylobacter are known to cause a great deal of illness in the U.S. Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack last week announced new performance standards to reduce these pathogens in poultry with the hope that tens of thousands in potential illnesses will be prevented. VILSACK: Hopefully it will also give us a snapshot overtime of how well the industry is controlling this contamination. This is one of many steps that the FSIS has recently taken in response to the Food Safety Working Group recommendations. Initial focus was on e. coli 0157 and we felt it was appropriate and necessary to have a companion effort in these two other pathogen areas. At the same time we're continuing to work to develop a public information system to help the agency more rapidly and accurately identify trends, patterns, anomalies in data and that's allowing us to more efficiently and effectively respond to new threats. The standards announced are the first-ever standards for Campylobacter, and mark the first revision to the Salmonella standards for chicken since 1996 and for turkeys since the first standards were set in 2005. A comment period is now open for agencies to respond and Vilsack says after that they will proceed with the plan. VILSACK: We're giving them about 60 days to respond and at the end of 60 days we intend to proceed forward with putting the standards in place and so our hope is that somewhere around July – sometime between July 1 and August 1 these will be in place. The President's Food Safety Working Group has set a goal of having 90 percent of all poultry establishments meeting the revised Salmonella standard by the end of 2010. The announcement builds on the series of steps to enhance food safety taken by USDA over the past year as part of the Food Safety Working Group. VILSACK: What they established was an opportunity for us to utilize these standards to improve performance that we still have work to do to get a number of the slaughter facilities up to this new standard bet we are making good progress. In terms of salmonella it's roughly 7 ½ % safer with these standards than it would otherwise be and that translates as I said earlier to 26-thousand fewer illnesses potentially. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network.