ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, November 29, 1996 TAG: 9611290091
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAT DOOLEY LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
OVER THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, the poultry industry will spend up to $357 million developing new rules to reduce consumers' risk of food poisoning.
All around there are chickens on conveyer belts, chickens in huge plastic, ice-filled bins, chickens on Styrofoam party trays, chickens hanging headless from hundreds of metal hooks rotating overhead like suspended cars on an amusement-park ride.
Some 330,000 chickens a day pass through Perdue's processing plant in Accomac on Virginia's Eastern Shore. Many of the fowl are destined for dinner tables up and down the East Coast.
Inside the plant, dozens of employees scurry about in parkas, hats, gloves - layered under or over white lab coats and hair nets - in subfreezing temperatures.
Among them is grading foreman Josephine Armstrong, who helps sort birds destined for sale as whole broilers or parts.
Every hour, Armstrong plucks three carcasses from a conveyer belt and presses a thermometer deep into their breast cavities.
Part of her job is ensuring the birds stay cool enough to prevent the growth of pathogens - micro-organisms that cause food poisoning in humans.
Outwardly, it's business as usual at Perdue. But behind the scenes, the East Coast's largest poultry producer is preparing for big changes that will affect the meat and poultry industry.
Under new federal guidelines designed to reduce consumers' risk of food poisoning, employees such as Armstrong will begin scrutinizing every step of operations at thousands of meat and poultry processing plants nationwide.
Over the next four years, the industry will spend $305 million to $357 million developing and implementing the rules - the most sweeping changes to affect packers and slaughterhouses since 1906, the United States Department of Agriculture reports.
"Perdue has been doing a lot of this already," said Jim Perdue, chairman of the board of the Salisbury, Md.,-based company made famous by his father, Frank.
Many of the nation's 9,100 plants have been using safeguards similar to those spelled out in the ruling. Now, all of them will be required to check and log the results for inspectors to verify.
Plants also will test for E.coli and salmonella - using science instead of the old look-smell-and-touch method - to help detect food-borne pathogens.
New regulations
Announced by the Clinton administration in July, the 138-page Pathogen Reduction and Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point Systems (HACCP) will be phased in over 42 months, beginning in January.
Meat and poultry plants, including 62 in Virginia, are gearing up.
The program puts more responsibility for food safety in the hands of processors, who will design and implement their own checkpoints.
"It used to be more command and control, where we told them what they had to do," said Jacque Knight, a spokesman for the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service. The USDA regulates meat and poultry processing.
The goal is to prevent or reduce pathogens on meat and poultry leaving slaughterhouses and processing plants.
Because all warm-blooded mammals, including cows, chickens and humans, carry micro-organisms in their digestive tracts, it is impossible to eliminate pathogens, experts say.
In Accomac, Perdue implemented its Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point Systems (HACCP) in 1995. Its system was a pilot for the USDA program.
Since the early 1900s, the USDA and the meat and poultry industry have relied on the senses to inspect products, said Dr. Merle Pierson, a professor of food science technology and a HACCP specialist at Virginia Tech.
In the 1960s, the Pillsbury company invented the first HACCP to make sure foods launched into space with America's astronauts would be safe to eat. In the 1970s, the canned-food industry adopted its own control point systems to reduce cases of botulism.
The Food and Drug Administration introduced control point systems last year.
Talk of using them in the meat and poultry industry had been around since the 1980s, Pierson said. Then, in 1993, an outbreak of E.coli 0157:H7 in several western states sickened up to 700 people who ate tainted hamburgers from a fast-food chain. Four children died.
"That was a wake-up call to the industry, to the American public and to the regulators," said the USDA's Knight.
Public safeguards
American consumers have been warned for years to thoroughly cook poultry to cut the risk of food-borne pathogens including salmonella.
After the E.coli outbreak, Knight said, the public demanded greater safeguards from industry and the federal government.
By requiring companies to develop their own systems, the program shifts responsibility from USDA inspectors to plant owners and employees. It also focuses on keeping food-borne pathogens from growing, instead of eliminating them afterward.
For example, processors will be required to show inspectors how they sanitize conveyer belts, meat grinders and other equipment daily. This first segment of the rules, Sanitation Standard Operating Procedures, goes into effect in January.
"Previously, an inspector would walk through and say, Well, this looks pretty good,' " said the USDA's Knight. Now, federal inspectors will look for specifics, making sure sanitation procedures have been recorded and followed by plant personnel.
By January 1998, major processors such as Perdue must have their HACCP checkpoints in place. Smaller companies will have through 2000 to implement them.
Also under the ruling, slaughterhouses will test carcasses for generic E.coli, to prevent or reduce contamination. In poultry, the test is used as an indicator of other pathogens, said Virginia Tech's Pierson.
There are many strains of E.coli, he explained. The virulent 0157:H7 has been associated with undercooked beef, and unpasteurized apple cider and juice, but not poultry.
At slaughterhouses and processing plants, the USDA will test carcasses and raw ground products for salmonella - a frequent cause of food-borne illness associated with poultry.
Cooking safely
The USDA estimates there are as many as 4,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses from the consumption of meat and poultry each year. Most contamination occurs after products leave the packing plant, where temperatures and storage are not as well monitored.
"Over 95 percent of food-borne illnesses are mishandling at the retail and consumer level," despite safe-handling labels displayed on meat and poultry since 1993, Pierson said.
Some consumer groups have called for more frequent testing of products during processing. But the USDA and industry representatives say pathogens are rare - and difficult to find.
Pierson likens the search to reaching into a bag of 99 cards and pulling out the only ace.
Nor does testing prevent pathogens, he said. "There is a terrible misconception that testing will provide a safe product," he said.
In 1994 the Council for Agricultural Science and Technology said testing "can be an unreliable and misleading indicator of food safety."
For now, the focus remains on prevention and the development of better methods of pathogen detection.
Perdue alone spends $4 million to $6 million annually on research to make food safer, Jim Perdue said.
Meat and poultry in the United States is the most sanitary, most inspected and safest in the world, he said.
On Monday, the USDA and FDA will begin three days of public meetings in Washington to discuss ways to make packaged foods safer after they leave processing plants.
Currently, conditions in trucks carrying the products or in markets where they are sold are not regulated, though the USDA can perform random testing of samples, Knight said.
"In this country, when people buy food, they expect it to be safe to eat," Knight said. "They don't expect to become ill but they can."
Consumers must stay vigilant, Pierson said.
Thorough cooking - until beef is no longer pink, and the juices run clear in chicken - kills food-borne pathogens. Improper handling and storage - not cleaning cutting boards or utensils or thawing food at room temperature - contribute to pathogen growth.
"It would be a terrible mistake," Pierson said, "for consumers to feel they can disregard safe food handling."
LENGTH: Long : 169 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. & 2. MIKE HEFFNER THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT Newly hatchedby CNBchicks, above, ride a conveyor belt while workers separate them from
bits of shell and send them on to farms. The company's 20 hatcheries
go through about 700,000 eggs a week to meet consumer demands for
chicken. At right, the eggs are marked with dates and flock numbers
before incubation. It takes 21 days for an egg to hatch.
3. Perdue lab technician Jeff Clark prepares feed samples for
testing at a Salisbury, Md., microbiology lab.
4. Monitoring carcass temperature to make sure they stay below 40
degrees Fahrenheit is one way to keep food-borne bacteria from
growing.
5. Samples of feed grain are tested for salmonella bacteria and
other pathogens at microbiology labs like this one in Salisbury,
Md.
6. A 20-day-old broiler chicken walks through the Fulton Acres farm.
Broilers grow for seven weeks with 27,000 other chickens in a 20,000
square-foot house.