The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) today announced two joint public meetings to hear stakeholder presentations on measuring progress on food safety.
The first public meeting will be held on Wednesday, July 21, 2010, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, 151 East Wacker Dr., in Chicago Ill. A second public meeting will be held on October 20, 2010, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at The Crowne Plaza Portland Downtown, 1441 NE Second Ave., in Portland, Ore.
The public meetings announced today are extensions of an initial one-day public workshop held March 30, 2010.
At the two public meetings, the agencies will hear presentations from any interested stakeholder, including members of consumer groups, industry, public health experts and state and local regulators on the measurements they recommend or are using to assess performance in food safety. The agencies will present information on the Food Safety Working Group’s charge to create meaningful metrics to measure the effectiveness of the nation’s food safety system. They also will present current thinking, focusing on how these metrics might be applied to evaluate the success of FDA’s shell egg safety rule, FSIS implementation of broiler chicken controls and CDC’s efforts to collect and analyze human disease data. Additionally, the agencies will present information about the shared list of metrics that was developed by them to support the work of the Food Safety Working Group.
Documents and agenda items related to the two regional public meetings will be accessible prior to the public meetings on the FSIS webpage at http://www.fsis.usda.gov/News/Meetings_&_Events/
For registration information, contact Jodee Warner, EDJ Associates, Inc., 11300 Rockville Pike, Suite 1001, Rockville, MD 20852, at (240) 221-4296, or by e-mail at jwarner@edjassociates.com.
Meeting participants are encouraged to register electronically and in advance on the FSIS webpage at www.fsis.usda.gov/News/Meetings_&_Events/. Participants may also register by fax, e-mail, or telephone by providing information, including: name, organization, address, telephone number and e-mail address to the registration contact.
For general questions about the public meeting, requests to make an oral presentation and submission of a presentation, or for special accommodations due to a disability, contact Juanita Yates, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, FDA, at (301) 436-1731, or by e-mail at juanita.yates@fda.hhs.gov. The deadline for requesting to make an oral presentation during the Chicago meeting is July 6, 2010.
All documents related to the public meeting will be available for public inspection in the FSIS Docket Room, USDA, FSIS, Room 2-2127, George Washington Carver Center, 5601 Sunnyside Avenue, Mailstop 5474, Beltsville, MD 20705-5474, between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday or at the FDA, Division of Dockets Management (HFA-305), Food and Drug Administration, 5630 Fishers Lane, Room 1061, Rockville, MD 20852, as soon as they become available.
A notice about the two joint public meetings is scheduled to be published in the June 30, 2010, Federal Register. After publication, the Federal Register notice can be found on the FSIS webpage at www.fsis.usda.gov/News/Meetings_&_Events/.
Source: American Meat Institute