Dive Brief:
- The U.S. Department of Agriculture still has yet to finalize or update many safety standards that are meant to protect against the risk of foodborne illness from meat and poultry products, the Government Accountability Office found, as food recalls surged in 2024.
- USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service, which regulates and oversees meat and poultry processing, has paused work on standards for illness-causing pathogens since 2018, including Salmonella and Campylobacter, in chicken, pork, beef and turkey. The halt in rulemaking comes as FSIS focuses on a framework of standards for Salmonella in raw poultry.
- GAO issued five recommendations for FSIS, including that the agency collaborates more closely with other USDA agencies and study the health risks that come from delays in food safety standards. FSIS neither agreed nor disagreed with its recommendations.
Dive Insight:
Food recalls in 2024 reached a five-year high, with Boar's Head and BrucePac asking customers to throw out millions of pounds of meat products after detecting the presence of Listeria.
Those recalls spurred USDA to announce stronger oversight of Listeria, with FSIS saying it would ramp up inspections at plants. However, USDA still has work to do when it comes to addressing Salmonella and Campylobacter, according to GAO.
The USDA has largely paused work on individual standards, GAO said, though it declared Salmonella an adulterant in raw poultry last May. FSIS is using the pillars of its raw poultry rule to create a framework for a variety of chicken and turkey products, which would determine whether products are adulterated based on Salmonella levels and serotypes.
FSIS said that a larger framework would target serotypes more frequently associated with foodborne illness. However, GAO questioned whether development of the framework came at the cost of lapses in food safety oversight.
Agency officials gave no timeline for when the framework would be finalized, GAO said. FSIS could not confirm whether focusing on its framework for Salmonella in raw poultry created gaps in oversight of bacteria in other products, according to GAO’s recent report.
"Outbreaks continue to occur that involve products for which FSIS has not updated or developed pathogen standards since 2018 or earlier," the report said.
The government watchdog identified two ongoing challenges the USDA faces in reducing food pathogens: developing and updating standards, and its limited control outside of the slaughter and processing plants it oversees.
"FSIS’s decision to focus its resources on a framework of standards for Salmonella in raw poultry, when finalized, will address one of the pathogens and products most responsible for illness and death," the report said. "In the meantime, however, to avoid gaps in the oversight of pathogens that could impact other meat and poultry products, the agency needs to better understand the trade-offs of solely focusing on a single framework—such as by assessing risks to human health."
Sarah Zimmerman contributed to this story.
