Test results from the U.S. Department of Agriculture indicate reductions in the prevalence of Salmonella in chicken plants, USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) reported in its “Quarterly Progress Report on Salmonella and Campylobacter Testing of Selected Raw Meat and Poultry Products: Preliminary Results, July 2014 to September 2014,” which is available here.
There were 3,985 samples collected and analysed for the PR/HACCP Verification program. From the previous quarter, the percentage of plants in Category 3:
- Decreased for Young Chicken plants (from 4.5 to 3.5 percent; from eight out of 178 plants to six out of 171 plants)
- Decreased for Ground Chicken plants (from 25.0 percent to zero; from two out of eight plants to 0 out of 1 plant tested)
There were 2,918 samples co-analysed for Campylobacter, with the following percentage positive results:
- Young Chicken – 6.9 percent (2,396 samples analyzed)
- 88.2 percent of all establishments are in Category 1, while 2.3 percent are in Category 3. The remaining plants are in some version of Category 2.
Not Ready to Eat Comminuted Poultry Sampling Project Results for all finished products are:
- Salmonella – 46.8 percent (2,802 out of 5,984 samples)
- Campylobacter – 7.6 percent (453 out of 5,978 samples)
There were no PR/HACCP samples collected for ground chicken because sampling of ground poultry was suspended at the start of the Not Ready To Eat (NRTE) Comminuted Poultry Sampling Project, except in Category 3 establishments.
