The Public Health Impact of Implementing a Concentration‐Based Microbiological Criterion for Controlling Salmonella in Ground Turkey

Abstract

Despite initiatives to improve the safety of poultry products in the United States, progress has stalled, and salmonellosis incidence is still above Healthy People 2020's goal. One strategy to manage Salmonella and verify process control in poultry establishments is to implement microbiological criteria (MC) linked to public health outcomes. Concentration‐based MC have been used by the food industry; however, the public health impact of such approaches is only starting to be assessed. This study evaluated the public health impact of a concentration‐based MC for Salmonella in raw ground turkey consumed in the United States using a quantitative risk assessment modeling approach. The distribution of Salmonella concentration in ground turkey was derived from USDA‐FSIS monitoring surveys. Other variables and parameters were derived from public databases, literature, and expert opinion. Based on considered concentrations, implementing a MC of 1 cell/g led to an estimated 46.1% reduction (preventable fraction, PF) in the mean probability of illness when consumer cooking and cross‐contamination were included. The PF was consistent across scenarios including or excluding cross‐contamination and cooking, with slightly lower mean PF when cross‐contamination was included. The proportion of lots not compliant with the 1 cell/g MC was 1.05% in the main scenarios and increased nonlinearly when higher Salmonella concentrations were assumed. Assumptions on concentration variability across lots and within lots had a large impact, highlighting the benefit of reducing this uncertainty. These approach and results can help inform the development of MC to monitor and control Salmonella in ground turkey products.

Bio-Mapping Indicators and Pathogen Loads in a Commercial Broiler Processing Facility Operating with High and Low Antimicrobial Intervention Levels

“…There have been models published identifying risk factors for Salmonella control in poultry-processing operations [29], which support the conclusions of the current study. Published risk assessments support this approach, and the results of the current study can be used to conduct probabilistic quantitative microbial risk assessments similar to those conducted in prior publications (QMRA) [30]. Finally, this integrated approach to measure the performance of the pathogencontrol system provides a risk-based approach to food-safety management and therefore is needed to establish a new performance standard for Salmonella spp.…”

“…Federally inspected establishments collect on a routine basis samples before and after chilling for every 22,000 birds processed. For example, if a single evisceration line processes 660,000 birds in one week, there would be a total of thirty samples (30) collected in one week for one of the indicator organisms compared to one (1) sample collected by USDA FSIS. These samples are in addition to other microbial samples collected by each establishment to evaluate the performance of some of their intervention schemes.…”

Risk assessment predicts most of the salmonellosis risk in raw chicken parts is concentrated in those few products with high-levels of high-virulent serotypes ofSalmonella

“…This and another recent chicken parts QMRA (Lambertini et al, 2019) show that the risk is concentrated in products with the high-levels of Salmonella (products >1 MPN/g and >10 MPN/g), as do studies in ground turkey (Lambertini et al, 2021; Sampedro et al, 2024) and ground beef (Strickland et al, 2023). But all these studies model product contamination data collected using MPN method for the enumeration (in our case the Baseline parts survey data), which unfortunately has an upper limit of quantification lower than levels responsible for much of the risk (assay limit of 11 MPN/ml, here parts rinse, which translates to 2.4 CFU/g parts).…”

“…Studies of the Salmonella dose-response (DR) relationship indicated that outbreaks are often associated with higher doses causing a higher attack rate (Teunis et al, 2010). Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) studies investigating Salmonella level- based risk management strategies suggest removing products with high-levels of Salmonella may substantially reduce the public health risk from chicken parts (Lambertini et al, 2019), ground turkey (Lambertini et al, 2021) and ground beef (Strickland et al, 2023).…”

The genomic and epidemiological virulence patterns ofSalmonella entericaserovars in the United States

“…enterica is a diverse pathogen. Yet, most risk assessments and food safety regulations informed by these assessments only separate Typhoidal Salmonellosis and non-Typhoidal Salmonellosis, treating serovars as a homogenous unit [62][63][64]. However, our results suggests that strains with the highest incidence of domestically acquired sporadic cases and outbreaks of human infections share a common virulence repertoire.…”