USDA Proposes 'Test & Hold' Rule For Meat

No start date for mandatory rule, Vilsack says...
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack on Tuesday announced a proposed new rule to require all US beef, pork and poultry producers to keep their products off store shelves until tests for pathogens are returned and prove the food is safe.

Under current procedures, producers are allowed to ship raw cuts of meat into the marketplace after testing but before results have been verified--and then recall these if test results reveal contamination.

On a mid-day conference call, Vilsack told reporters that putting the proposed new rule in place would eliminate about 25,000 cases of foodborne disease annually. And it could have prevented about 44 tainted food recalls between 2007 and 2009, he said.

USDA says it inspects "billions of pounds" of meat, poultry and processed eggs every year.

"Most establishments already do their own testing and holding of products," Vilsack said, and pointed to many of the meat industry's largest producers, such as Tyson Foods and Cargill, as supporters of the new rule.

Small and very small meat producers will be most impacted by the rule, and Vilsack said USDA will work with them to get up to speed under the new rule. USDA currently has no date set for the rule to go into effect, Vilsack said, though both he and Under Secretary for Food Safety Dr. Elisabeth Hagen, who was also on the conference call, hailed the proposed new rule as progress from President Obama's Food Safety Working Group.

Getting 'test and hold' to actually work requires test results to be returned far faster, something that is not necessarily in place everywhere across the US.

When asked why it has taken USDA so long to impose a mandatory and uniform test and hold rule for all producers, Hagen was very politic.

"I think we should be focused on why are we doing this today as opposed to why wasn't it done before, because we think it's the right thing to do," said Hagen.