Reports

Letter Report on the Review of the Food Safety and Inspection Service Risk-Based Approach to Public Health Attribution (2009)

The proper inspection of meat and poultry products -- foods that are major contributors to human-foodborne illness -- is vital to the public health of our nation. The task belongs to the Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which recently proposed a risk-based methodology for prioritizing its inspection of slaughtering and meat processing facilities. Facilities are ranked according to the risk their food products pose to human health, based (in part) on the proportion of illnesses attributable to those food products (such as deli meat and ground beef). At FSIS' request, this NRC letter report evaluates the agency's methodology for ranking facilities based on the extent to which their food products are potential sources of Salmonella, E. coli O157:H7, and Listeria monocytogenes infection. The report finds that allocating illnesses among food products is extraordinarily difficult because the assessment must cover the "farm-to-fork continuum" -- for example, a contaminant may pass from a bird to a chicken at the farm, from one chicken to another during processing, and from chicken to lettuce in a kitchen. Thus, an illness could be attributed to the lettuce, obscuring the importance of contamination in chickens much earlier in the continuum. The report recommends that FSIS consider using additional public health data and developing a methodology that more clearly presents the rationale behind the agency's approach. Further, because attribution data are scarce, FSIS should consider models for prioritizing risk that do not rely on food product attribution or that use attribution data in a different way.
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