The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA’s FSIS) recently highlighted its key achievements in 2023 that helped strengthen food safety and the supply chain, including efforts on a new regulatory framework to crack down on Salmonella in poultry.
A recent study reviewed the efficacy of environmentally friendly pathogen inactivation methods against Listeria monocytogenes biofilms in food production environments, specifically, electrolyzed water, plasma-activated water, ozone, and enzymes.
FDA recently published revisions to one guidance for industry and withdrew another. Specifically, FDA released revisions to the Preventive Controls for Human Food (PCHF) Draft Guidance, and withdrew its guidance onchlorpyrifos residues due to the U.S. Court of Appeals voiding EPA's ban on food tolerances for the pesticide chemical.
A new FDA webpage lists regulations that the Human Foods Program (HFP) plans to publish by October 2024 and longer-term regulations HFP is prioritizing. FDA also updated the list of guidance topics that it is considering and expects to publish by the end of 2024, which was last updated in July 2023.
Aflatoxin-contaminated nuts and seeds dominated mycotoxin notifications made through the EU’s Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed (RASFF) between 2011 and 2021, according to a recent study.
A recent study evaluated the effect of brine pH, salt level, storage temperature, and use of hydrogen peroxide to kill Listeria monocytogenes and Staphylococcus aureus, salt-tolerant pathogens known to contaminate cheese brine.
A recent study has demonstrated the extent to which defects on food contact surfaces in tree fruit packinghouses lowers the efficacy of sanitizers against Listeria monocytogenes biofilms.
A study demonstrated that fresh-ground tomato juice can inactivate both typhoidal and non-typhoidal strains of Salmonella, as well as uropathogenic E. coli strains.
USDA’s Pesticide Data Program Annual Summary for 2022 shows that more than 99 percent of products sampled through PDP had residues below tolerances set by EPA. However, testing for persistent environmental contaminants that are no longer used as pesticides in the U.S. showed the presence of certain banned chemicals in some foods.
Recent sampling and testing of ingredients used for plant-based dairy alternatives has revealed highly variable microbial loads among ingredients, although many samples contained a high proportion of spore-forming microbes as part of the total counts.
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