Federal Register Notice, FSIS-2012-0026, Compliance Guideline for Controlling Salmonella in Market Hogs has significant flaws and incorrectly suggests that current processes are not effective in controlling Salmonella, according to comments AMI submitted Friday to the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).
"Throughout the guideline FSIS asserts that [market hog] slaughter management practices should be improved to address Salmonella. In addition, foodborne illness outbreaks attributed to pork are used to support the 'need' for this compliance guideline, purportedly because products derived from market hogs were the cause of Salmonella illnesses," AMI said.
The Institute stressed that current processes used in federally inspected market hog processing plants are effective in controlling Salmonella. According to AMI, previous market hog baselinescompleted in 1996 and 1998 and the latest baseline completed in 2011 demonstrate continuous improvement in percent positive Salmonella. The first survey reported a Salmonella percent positive of 8.7% and the second survey reported a Salmonella percent positive of 6.9%. The 2010-2011 report states, "The estimated prevalence of Salmonella in Market Hogs is 1.66% (confidence interval of between 0.82% and 2.51)." In addition, there have been no FSIS recalls for raw pork products related to Salmonella illness from 1999-2013 and from 2006-2011 the FSIS verification sampling for Salmonella averaged 2.9%, significantly less than the performance standard of 8.7%.
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