Food Safety

The Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced in 1997 that it would modify its meat and poultry slaughter inspection program to make industry more responsible for identifying carcass defects. Before making the change permanent, USDA developed a model to test whether a prevention-oriented inspection system that uses plant personnel to examine each carcass and USDA inspectors to verify that quality standards are met would continue to ensure the safety of meat and poultry products. USDA's pilot project for chickens had several design and methodology problems that compromised the overall validity and reliability of its results. First, the chicken pilot that USDA designed lacked a control group--a critical design flaw that precluded a comparison between the performance of the inspection systems at those plants that volunteered to participate in the pilot and that of plants that did not participate. Second, the chicken plants that volunteered to participate in the baseline measurement phase of the pilot were not randomly selected, and they did not include plants from all chicken-producing areas or plants of all sizes. Third, the pilot project's methodology did not take into account such variables as seasonal changes and plant modifications that could affect project results. Finally, USDA's pilot project did not include features of the modified inspection systems in Australia and Canada that would be important considerations in ensuring the successful implementation of a modified inspection system nationwide. Notwithstanding the project's design problems, the data themselves do not conclusively demonstrate that modified inspections are at least equal to traditional inspections.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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