Scientific Criteria to Ensure Safe Food (2003) / Chapter Skim
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1 Historical Perspective on the Use of Food Safety Criteria and Performance Standards
1 Historical Perspective on the Use of Food Safety Criteria and Performance Standards
Pages 13-27
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From page 13... ...
In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, medical science equated dirt with disease, and consequently early public health regulatory efforts placed a strong emphasis on sanitation and elimination of "filth" (Chapin,1970~. This was reflected in the Massachusetts Health Act of 1797, in which towns were instructed to establish a health committee and appoint a health officer whose sole prescribed duty was "to remove all filth of any kind whatever .
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From page 14... ...
It was in this social and scientific context that Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a scathing commentary on the industrial society that portrayed numerous abuses in the slaughter industry. Responding to this book and associated public concerns, in 1906 Congress passed the Federal Meat Inspection Act, which provided for the inspection of slaughter facilities in order to prevent the introduction of dead, diseased, disabled, and dying animals into the food supply.
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From page 15... ...
It was in shellfish, with their recognized association with typhoid fever, that microbiological criteria first began to play a major role in food protection (Clem, 1994~. With an increasing appreciation of the linkage between typhoid fever, raw shellfish consumption, and fecal contamination of harvest waters, efforts were focused at an early point on development of bacteriological methods for defining contamination.
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From page 16... ...
For the meat and poultry industry, it is exclusion of dead, diseased, disabled, and dying animals from the food supply; for processed foods, it is exclusion of adulterants and correct labeling; for oysters, it is the absence of high levels of fecal bacteria in harvest waters; while for EPA it is the presence of specific chemical or microbiological hazards. The need for such standards in the food industry goes to the heart of regulatory theory, which recognizes the necessity for the government to establish standards as a counterbalance to private economic incentives.
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From page 17... ...
Use offecal coliform indicators for shellfish. As discussed earlier, fecal coliform standards for shellfish harvest waters were implemented as a response to public health concerns about the spread of typhoid fever through raw molluscan shellfish.
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From page 18... ...
Organoleptic inspection focuses on the identification of birds contaminated with feces; these birds are subsequently removed from the processing line for reprocessing. However, although visible fecal contamination is a relatively rare event, in some studies Campylobacter has been isolated from over 80 percent of chicken parts available at retail sale (NRC, 1987~.
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From page 19... ...
2001) , a federal appeals court decided that USDA did not have statutory authority to withdraw its inspectors from a meat processing and grinding plantan action that would shut it down even though the plant had failed to meet the Salmonella performance standard on three consecutive occasions.
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"Food Safety: Risk-Based Inspections and Microbial Monitoring Needed for Meat and Poultry" (Herman, 1994~. In his testimony before a House subcommittee, Harman, speaking for the General Accounting Office, stated that "A HACCP system is generally considered the best approach currently available to ensure safe foods because it focuses on preventing contamination rather than detecting contamination once it has occurred." Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point System and Guidelines for its Application (CAC,1997~.
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From page 21... ...
The past decade has seen development of a variety of creative approaches to integrate regulatory controls with HACCP. Within this process, however, there have been several problem areas: · The need to match the inherent flexibility of HACCP with a similarly flexible regulatory system that encourages plants to analyze and monitor their own hazard profile and respond accordingly.
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From page 22... ...
In brief, the PR/HACCP rule requires all meat and poultry slaughter and processing establishments to design and implement a HACCP system, with the schedule of implementation dependent on plant size. The exact elements of the HACCP plan are not specified in order to: encourage companies to carefully evaluate the particular public health hazards associated with each specific product line and plant; provide companies with the freedom to develop innovative methods for control of these hazards; and provide companies with the flexibility to identify Critical Control Points that would have maximal utility in the control of potential hazards in their products.
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From page 23... ...
The decision was made to set the initial standard at a level equal to the current national mean for that product class (e.g., in studies conducted in the early l990s, 25 percent of broiler chickens were found to be contaminated with Salmonella; consequently, the Salmonella performance standard for plants was set at 25 percent contamination)
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From page 24... ...
Businesses frequently note their zero tolerance of offensive behavior (for example, eBay has zero tolerance for illegal items auctioned on its site [Harmon, 1999] , and AOL has a policy of zero tolerance for hate messagesinits chat rooms end message boards [Farhi, 20011~.
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From page 25... ...
on no residue and zero tolerance as they relate to the registration of pesticides, the setting of tolerances for pesticides, and FDA enforcement of pesticide residues in foods. This report considered the development of increasingly sensitive analytical methods for residue detection, the problem of background levels of pesticide residues not related to immediate applications to food products, and the scientific and administrative barriers to employing zero tolerance for pesticide regulation.
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From page 26... ...
1996. Pathogen reduction; hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP)
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From page 27... ...
1996. Distribution of Vibrio vulnificus in the Chesapeake Bay.
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