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At the July 15 grand opening event for the new USDA-FSIS Midwestern Food Safety Laboratory in Missouri, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins teased the agency’s new food safety policy plan aimed at reducing foodborne illness. 

USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (USDA-FSIS) laboratories now use an improved enrichment method for Campylobacter in poultry meat samples, which reduced enrichment incubation time by half, and shaved a day off of reporting times for results. 

The executive summary includes global risk characterizations for parasite-food commodity combinations for Cryptosporidium, Cyclospora, Giardia, Toxoplasma gondii, and other foodborne protozoan parasites.

USDA-FSIS released a notice in late June that it plans to extend its H5N1 Influenza A Dairy Cow Testing Program until September 30. Meanwhile, the EU released a new guidance document on preparedness, prevention, and response for avian flu in animals and food.

This article explores the "why," "how," and challenges encountered when conducting challenge studies for safer food products and longer shelf life.

In this bonus episode of Food Safety Matters, we speak to Kye Luker, Chief Product Officer at FlexXray, about how external X-ray inspection services can assist companies in responding to a foreign material (FM) contamination event, and the ways in which inspection technology is evolving.

In the second of this two-part episode of Food Safety Matters, we interviewed professionals from industry, consumer advocacy, and foodservice, live from the show floor of the Food Safety Summit, which took place on May 12–15 in Rosemont, Illinois. We discussed the efficacy of finished product testing, educating and advocating for consumers, food safety culture tools, and more.

In the study, a high-throughput analysis system with an analysis time of 13 minutes was developed to detect pesticide residues in corn. Corn samples from different origins were found to contain distinct exogenous pesticide profiles.

In this bonus episode of Food Safety Matters, we speak to Dr. Savannah Applegate, Senior Consultant at Elanco Poultry Food Safety, about the role of diagnostics and testing in poultry food safety and disease management.

A Center for Produce Safety-funded proof-of-concept study is exploring a novel, high-throughput capture and concentration method for hepatitis A virus in fruit wash water, which uses magnets and hydrogel nanoparticles. It could be added to existing FDA and ISO digital PCR assay workflows, potentially reducing false positives.