Scientific Criteria to Ensure Safe Food (2003) / Chapter Skim
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Executive Summary
Executive Summary
Pages 1-12
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The technical, financial, and educational efforts made by industry to implement HACCP and by the regulatory agencies to audit such implementation are commendable, but further improvements are warranted. The committee believes that the emphasis of food safety regulatory agencies must continue to be on prevention, reduction, or elimination of foodborne hazards along the food continuum.
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A collective effort is needed to further improve the safety of food, and the following actions should be pursued: · Congress should require the development of a comprehensive national plan to harmonize the foodborne disease surveillance that is conducted by public health agencies with the monitoring of pathogens across the food production, processing, and distribution continuum that is conducted by food safety regulatory agencies. Congress should allocate funds not only to develop and implement this plan, but also to enhance programs such as FoodNet, PulseNet, eLEXNET, foodborne outbreak reporting and data sharing, and other national foodborne disease surveillance systems conducted by public health authorities.
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Develop a Salmonella performance standard for beef trim intended for grinding and reevaluate the current Salmonella performance standard for ground beef. Require that all beef trim for grinding be exposed to some verified pathogen reduction intervention.
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should take the following specific measures regarding scientific criteria, HACCP, imported foods, and improving the safety of seafood, produce, and dairy products: Include a process validation protocol in the Fish and Fisheries Products Hazards and Control Guide and appoint an advisory committee to periodically update this guide. Develop strategies to ensure the safety of imported seafood and produce by focusing on pathogen intervention strategies prior to shipment and on international harmonization of standards.
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To remedy this lack of flexibility, Congress should enable regulatory agencies the ability to incorporate flexibility into the administrative process so that food safety criteria can be efficiently adjusted to meet future public health goals. This flexibility includes incorporating new processing or assessment techniques and allowing the agencies the ability to change a performance standard to align it with the best contemporary scientific knowledge.
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The Need to Link Food Safety Criteria to Public Health Objectives Food safety criteria have the common objective of protecting or improving public health. Therefore, science-based food safety criteria must be clearly linked to the public health problem they are designed to address.
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· Documenting the limitations of the data and the assumptions used, and making this information available to the public, provide essential transparency to the process of developing food safety criteria. When appropriate data are available, a performance standard may be developed by (1)
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The thesis that flexibility allows innovation, borne out in the area of environmental regulations, may be amenable to extension into the food safety regulatory environment. Foodborne Disease Surveillance and the Monitoring of Microbial Contaminants in Food Foodborne disease surveillance is essential for defining trends in foodborne disease, identifying outbreaks, allocating the burden of disease among food groups, and evaluating food safety programs.
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The guidelines requiring a specific lethality for Salmonella as a critical control point in HACCP plans for production of cooked beef and poultry and other related products are not well justified scientifically and have resulted in an excessively conservative performance standard. The scientific bases for the stabilization performance standards required in the production of cooked beef and poultry and other related products are not clear; the validity of the data and assumptions is difficult to determine.
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End-product testing provides a useful verification tool for control of these hazards. The implementation of postharvest treatments to progressively reduce the average number of annual reported illnesses attributed to raw oysters required by the Model Ordinance is a unique, flexible approach to safety; it establishes a public health objective and requires adequate industry performance without mandating a specific process or performance standard.
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cold in fruit juices involving surface treatment of whole fruit is an excellent example of using the combination strategy to develop a performance standard and could be used as a model when developing future food safety criteria. In contrast, the justification of the 5-D pathogen reduction process for juices lacks transparency.
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A scientifically appropriate performance standard for the reduction of a targeted pathogen in finished cheese products is needed. Research is needed on pathogen survival in cheese made from subpasteurized milk, and educational programs that illustrate the hazards of raw milk and raw milk-product consumption are warranted.
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