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Food Safety and Inspection
Service United States Department of Agriculture Washington, D.C. 20250-3700 |
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Food Safety and Inspection
Service United States Department of Agriculture Washington, D.C. 20250-3700 |
Remarks prepared for delivery by Thomas J. Billy, Administrator of the Food Safety and Inspection Service, before the Annual Cooperative Food Safety Research Workshop, December 9, 1997, Riverdale, MD.
Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here at the gathering of the Eighteenth Annual USDA Cooperative Food Safety Research Workshop. I cannot overemphasize how important it is that we maintain a dialog on our research needs and accomplishments.
FSIS is very proud of its long-standing research relationship with ARS, which was initially formalized in 1981 with an Memorandum of Understanding between the two agencies. In the ensuing roughly seventeen years, the research relationship has grown and changed, recently becoming a partnership focused on team work, in keeping with the trend throughout government.
I know it is clear to this audience the importance of research to our Departmental food safety initiatives. There are many data gaps that exist from farm to table that keep us from making further progress in our fight against foodborne illness. We need to know more about the hazards in meat, poultry, and egg products and their relationship to adverse human health outcomes.
Fortunately, we have been able to make significant progress in spite of these data gaps. Next month we begin HACCP implementation in the largest 300 meat and poultry plants, and Salmonella performance standards go into effect in concert with HACCP. We are also making progress on our farm-to-table strategy by working with industry, consumers, and the appropriate Federal, State and local government agencies to create a seamless national food safety assurance system.
But enormous challenges remain. We have just touched the surface in terms of doing all that we can to improve food safety. Your work is critical to our ability to progress even further. In fact, often it's a prerequisite to most progress.
We must plan carefully throughout this process to get the most return we can from our research investment. And, we must be sure that we are targeting research on the most critical areas in terms of public health concern.
To that end, in May 1997, FSIS issued its Food Safety Research Agenda as one means of communicating with those outside our Agency about our priorities for food safety research. The document, which was developed with the help of a working group representing a broad base of Federal scientific expertise, outlines the priority pathogenic organisms on which we recommend that research dollars be concentrated. It also establishes risk assessment as an integral feature in determining the public health hazards associated with these and other pathogens.
We encourage the use of this document as a standard against which food safety research projects should be judged. In other words, we expect research conducted to answer the questions outlined in this research agenda.
We are fortunate that this year the importance of food safety research has been confirmed at the highest levels of the Administration. The President's Food Safety Initiative strongly supports the need for research, as part of a comprehensive approach to reduce foodborne illness.
One challenge for the future will be to integrate the research needs stated in the FSIS Research Agenda, and those contained in the President's Food Safety Initiative, into a comprehensive plan. To assist in this process, the President's Food Safety Initiative calls for the convening of an interagency working group by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to coordinate Federal research planning and priority setting. The goal of this working group will be to develop a coordinated Federal food safety research plan, which will extend to our research partners in States, industry, and academia.
This interagency committee will hold its first meeting soon. The first step for the committee will be to develop an organized picture of the existing Federal research portfolio, followed by a determination of what steps need to be taken to design a more coordinated research plan.
It is clear in examining all of these initiatives that partnerships and teamwork are critical to the future. In the interest of enhancing the partnership between FSIS and ARS, we have developed a new strategy of using Scientific Liaison teams (SLTs) to track, guide, and assist the research that ARS performs on behalf of FSIS. The resulting improved communication between our two agencies will better enable ARS to meet the research needs and objectives of FSIS so that we may, in turn, meet our own food safety regulatory objectives.
The teams will meet periodically to review, evaluate, and guide current ARS research projects and provide feedback both to ARS and to the FSIS Office of Public Health and Science on a regular basis. Because the teams will be expected to evaluate food safety research from all sources for its scientific merit and relevance to FSIS needs, we envision that they will serve as an important link between FSIS research needs and the research community at large.
In closing, we look forward to hearing the reports from ARS scientists about the important work they have accomplished. Many of these issues are front-burner issues for us, such as the prevalence of premature browning of hamburger, new pathogen inactivation technologies such as steam pasteurization, and methods to detect Campylobacter. I appreciate your hard work on our behalf and look forward to continuing our partnership.
For Further Information Contact:
FSIS Food Safety Education and Communications Staff
Public Outreach and Communications
Phone: (202) 720-9352
Fax: (202) 720-9063
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