Part of Food Safety Magazine’s series with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), titled, “Evolution of a New Era: Advancing Strategies for Smarter Food Safety,” this episode of Food Safety Matters discusses the agency’s commodity-specific strategies to prevent foodborne illness outbreaks through FDA's Foodborne Outbreak Response Improvement Plan under the New Era of Smarter Food Safety initiative. We are joined by Stephen Hughes, Prevention Coordinator in the Office of Food Safety at FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and Dr. Jennifer McEntire, Chief Food Safety and Regulatory Officer at the International Fresh Produce Association (IFPA).
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) recently published two reports—one on control measures for Shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (STEC) in meat and dairy products, and another reviewing Listeria monocytogenes attribution, characterization, and monitoring in ready-to-eat (RTE) foods.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA’s FSIS) has proposed a regulatory framework that would change food safety in the poultry industry, including new flock testing requirements, enhancing process control and verification, and implementing enforceable final product standards.
A recent study has confirmed human fecal indicators on 50 percent of food-safe, single-use, new and unused gloves, as well as foodborne pathogens and other microbes.
The meat and poultry industries are an interesting mix of conservative practices and innovation. This article examines five topics and their implications to protein food, including meat safety as a model for the produce industry; increased interest in Salmonella and Listeria; USDA proposed rulemaking for meat and poultry; the move toward aggregated sampling; and developing safety needs for tissue-cultivated products.
A continuous improvement approach may be useful for poultry operations aiming to reduce the presence of Salmonella in their flocks, in light of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s initiative that includes increased quantitative microbial monitoring of incoming flocks to processing plants.
A recent study has estimated that removing products with a concentration of Listeria monocytogenes higher than 1 CFU/g could greatly reduce food contamination and associated foodborne illness cases. The study also found ready-to-eat (RTE) foods to be of greatest concern.
Based on Foodborne Diseases Active Surveillance Network (FoodNet) data, a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report states that the incidence of commonly foodborne enteric infections decreased in the U.S. during 2021.
A recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the World Health Organization raises a concern with the limited existing data on seaweed food safety, and recommends several actions to close knowledge gaps and increase the safety of seaweed consumption.
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