Remarks prepared for delivery by Ron Hicks, acting under secretary for food safety at the Association of Food and Drug Officials (AFDO) 113th Annual Education Conference: "Education Is the Foundation of Tomorrow," on June 8, 2009, in Chicago-Oak Brook, IL.

INTRODUCTION

Good morning. I'm happy to be here to discuss the USDA Office of Food Safety's ongoing efforts to protect the nation's food supply.

I'm struck by the fact that this is AFDO's 113th educational conference. For well over a century, your organization has helped train and educate public health officials on the front lines of food safety. That's an important accomplishment.

USDA has also been in the business of food safety for more than a century.

Office of Food Safety Overview
I'm sure most of you know about our role in the federal food safety system, but let me briefly explain for those who may not.

The Office of Food Safety oversees the Food Safety and Inspection Service, which carries out USDA's food safety inspection program. FSIS also conducts important public health outreach and education activities to keep the U.S. food supply safe.

Our mission is to ensure the safety and wholesomeness of the nation's commercial supply of meat, poultry and processed egg products. It doesn't matter if those products are domestically produced for our own consumers or whether they are imported to, or exported from, the United States.

Like AFDO, we've come a long way in the past century. And through advancements in science and technology, we are proud to claim the safest food supply in the world.

Inspection sets FSIS apart from the other 15 agencies across the Federal food safety system. It works and it will help us continue to prevent foodborne illness from making it into the nation's food supply. Our 6,585 inspectors are in the plants everyday.

But, our system is not without flaws. We still have plenty of work to do.

We all—regulators, industry and consumers—have a part to play in the food safety system. USDA is evolving to do our part, the best way we can.

Presentation Preview
Today I'll touch on three major topics: the future of the nation's food safety system; the role state and local partnerships can, and must, play in that system; and new developments and advancements that will help move USDA forward in modernizing our inspection system.

FUTURE OF FEDERAL FOOD SAFETY

The Need to Modernize
We've taken steps to modernize and bring our system into the 21st century.

Many of the laws regulating America's food supply were written more than a century ago, at a time when Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House; when the farm to fork chain was much, much shorter; and when 'poke and sniff' was the way we determined whether meat was safe.

Today, science and technology drive our public health decisions.

Hundred-year old organizations like AFDO or FSIS are something to be proud of. Hundred-year old laws governing a 21st century public health agency are not.

While the Federal Meat Inspection Act has helped protect America's meat, poultry and egg products over the past century, our challenge is to move into the next century of food safety and inspection.

It's time for action.

Food Safety in the News
Recently, a rash of food-borne illnesses from bacteria in spinach and hot peppers to Salmonella in peanut butter and pistachios has fueled calls for change.

Tainted food has been grabbing headlines much too frequently.

So it's no surprise that food safety has caught the current administration's attention. Thankfully, the Obama administration's priority is prevention and science-based food safety.

It's time to look at the entire food supply—across jurisdictions, across products—to determine where the risks are and then how to allocate resources to minimize them.

Gone are the days when USDA watched from the sidelines as scientists traced back E. coli to spinach. Or when FDA observed as a beef recall due to that same pathogen rocked the meat industry.

Although we've worked together and crossed paths on many food safety fronts, for far too long the easy response to events like these has been: that product is not under our jurisdiction.

A New Kind of Food Safety System
America needs a new kind of food safety system.

One that breaks down silos between agencies; that uses risk, hazards and performance measures for inspection; and prevents, rather than reacts, to food safety threats.

Our system is fragmented. I'm sure that no one knows that better than many of you in the room—many of our state and local partners.

To produce the biggest gains for consumers, we need to do the right thing; in the right places; with the right resources.

The Food Safety Working Group
President Obama helped set the pace by forming the Food Safety Working Group chaired by the secretaries of agriculture and health and human services.

Its charge is to make recommendations on what our national food safety system should look like, including well-defined roles and responsibilities.

The working group launched last month on May 13th with a listening session that brought business, government and consumer groups together to begin a positive dialogue that will eventually harmonize all these diverse interests. The administration is listening.

I think Representative Rosa DeLauro, a long-time food safety champion in Congress, marked the listening session best. She noted that some of those in the room had spent their entire professional careers working for this moment—this opportunity—to truly reform and modernize the food safety system.

Five Guiding Principles of the Working Group
At the session, we looked at five guiding principles for the Food Safety Working Group.

The first is Focusing on Prevention. Prevention identifies hazards before they become problems.

That means developing a system that holds industry accountable for understanding any possible hazards of their operations as well as their suppliers.

It also means the federal government receives the resources and tools to ensure proper oversight and works in partnership with state and local officials to verify compliance.

Next is Strengthening Risk Analysis and Detection.

This is where we collect quality data and coordinate it with our stakeholders using modern public health databases managed through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state and local health authorities.

The working group is calling for an integrated state and federal electronic laboratory network to detect high-risk biological, chemical and physical hazards in less than 48 hours.

We also looked at Expanding Risk-Based Inspection and Enforcement. We need to do a much better job of allocating our resources to achieve better public health outcomes. We know there are areas where we currently over and under-inspect.

Risk-based inspections based on accurate and reliable data will be the hallmark of the entire system because they allow us to place resources and money where it does the most good.

We know we shouldn't be inspecting everything with the same frequency and intensity. All products and processes carry different risks and hazards.

Obviously, when assessing the whole food supply we can place a risk on each operation and make intelligent and rational decisions.

Certain operations are more prone to contamination than others, so we scrutinize where the risk is greatest. It's an efficient protocol and it was recently endorsed in an independent study by the National Academy of Sciences.

The fourth principle we considered was Establishing Rapid Outbreak Response and Recovery. We know that, despite our best efforts, food safety systems do and will fail in the future. We need to have systems in place that target and minimize harm to consumers when these systems fail.

We must identify and pinpoint contamination within days—not weeks or months.

And in order to do that, we must ensure that we are Providing Adequate Resources, the fifth and final guiding principle of the working group.

Resources can mean a lot of things, but it's the ability to conduct surveys, verify testing and having the technical assistance, education and training to maintain an effective food safety network.

The cost of not taking action is much higher.

We believe these are good guidelines to move our system into the 21st century.

Pending Legislation
Cooperation across the board is long overdue, and we need to realize that everyone from the consumer to the producer has a role to play in safeguarding our food supply. That's the reality.

A good start is with Congress. There's a lot of good legislation on Capitol Hill that promotes prevention, transparency, clarity of purpose, roles in the food safety system and identifying risks. The bills also tackle a number of issues like frequency and intensity of inspection, and how to best verify food safety systems.

The bills propose different ways of reaching the same goal: basically, what's best for the consumer.

But there's no room for turf, here. It's time to take a fresh look at protecting public health, across the entire food supply and across jurisdictions. We have to build a national system that incorporates risk and allocates our limited resources intelligently.

I give the president and our food safety advocates in Congress credit for taking on this tough task and engaging our federal agencies involved in food safety.

USDA is actively involved in this discussion and is prepared to do what's needed to move food safety and inspection into the 21st century.

Whether we end up with a single food safety agency or a series of laws that consolidate or better define our roles within a system, I can't say. But whatever the system looks like, there needs to be balance and accountability to well defined standards at all levels.

We need to leverage all of our assets, including at the state and local level, but we need to set solid standards—national standards—that take the guess work out of food safety and give everyone a common objective to shoot for.

We all know more needs to be done, and we have an historic opportunity to seize the moment to improve the health of our nation.

LEVERAGING STATE AND LOCAL PARTNERSHIPS

It goes without saying that we need your help.

No discussion in Washington about America's food safety system would be complete without considering our state and local public health partners.

We don't need to look far to understand why. Minnesota's Department of Health, for example, solved two foodborne illness outbreaks in the past year, and has been upheld as a model for disease tracking.

State Inspection
And, as you know, USDA has a federal-state cooperative program for states to develop and administer inspection programs. These programs impose mandatory inspection and sanitation requirements that are at least equal to those in the Federal Meat Inspection Act and the Poultry Products Inspection Act.

Currently, 27 states provide inspection to more than 1,900 small and very small establishments.

Based on self-assessments provided during fiscal year 2008, FSIS determined that these 27 state programs have provided adequate documentation to show that they have meat and poultry inspection programs at least equal to federal requirements.

If you're interested in the final summary report and individual state reports, they're posted on the FSIS Web site.

In general, when it comes to the way federal government coordinates with state and local partners, we need to learn from successful models and best practices already in place—whether that be in tracing back diseases during outbreaks, or preventing them in the first place, with effective state inspection programs.

Let's move forward toward a national food safety system that builds upon and leverages these relationships.

ADVANCEMENTS AND UPDATES

Finally, I want to update you on some key advancements and developments at USDA. We're still working to be the best at what we do.

Food Safety Accomplishments
FSIS is taking new steps to tackle foodborne pathogens.

For E. coli O157:H7, we now have more targeted routine testing. We're testing more ground beef components and we refined the testing method and released draft compliance guidelines for industry.

We have also held several public meetings to discuss the challenges posed by E. coli O157:H7 and to work on solutions with industry, including small plants, consumers and other public health partners. Those discussions have helped us begin developing directives and policies to address new steps for the future.

For Salmonella, we've seen improvement in the data trends from our incentive and verification testing programs.

Further, FSIS has recently completed a microbiological baseline study of broiler carcasses and is analyzing the data on Salmonella and Campylobacter contamination from that baseline.

With FDA, we're also launching an interagency risk assessment of the public health impact of foodborne Listeria monocytogenes, or Lm, in some ready-to-eat foods that are sliced, prepared or packaged in retail facilities.

And FSIS scientists continue to stay abreast of new developments in microbial food safety and inform management of any impacts on policy.

Strengthening Our Data Infrastructure
As I mentioned earlier, our inspection system will need to continually evolve to better use risk in public health decision-making. But these decisions must be based on sound science and reliable data.

FSIS has made a good deal of progress in its collection, analysis and response to data, including using data to predict problems before they occur.

A strong data infrastructure will help us focus inspection activities on where they're needed most, prioritize resources and use data to protect public health.

On that note, FSIS is well ahead with the Public Health Information System, or PHIS.

PHIS includes a revolutionary preventative tool that predicts outcomes before they happen. It's the system of the future.

The system pulls data from all parts of the food system—imports, establishments, restaurants, retail outlets and the dinner table if you get sick. By analyzing these points we can identify the source of pathogen outbreaks.

As information is gathered it will be constantly monitored, instantly compared and assessed for unsafe patterns and irregularities that could spell trouble—anything from an overdue inspection, structural damage or contamination at a plant, to a mislabeled product.

PHIS will place violators in a three-tiered structure that provides guidelines for corrections and follow-up based on the severity of the findings.

The system will allow us to respond faster and more effectively through better coordination with mangers, stakeholders and other agencies, helping to improve investigations and contaminant tracing.

It's expected to be running by the end of 2010.

Training, Education and Outreach
Lastly, but not least, we continue to emphasize training, education and outreach, especially to small and very small plants and federal and state inspection personnel.

In 2008, we established a new program office, the Office of Outreach, Employee Education and Training, or OOEET, to lead this effort.

OOEET serves as a one-stop shop for access, resources and technical support for small and very small plants. It also ensures that all FSIS personnel have the training needed to do their jobs.

But we need to share this information with our state partners, so OOEET collaborates with state inspection programs to share training materials, provide technical advice and conduct outreach activities.

We make sure that the same training and resources we share with states and industry are the same as what we give to our own inspectors.

In the food safety system of the future, increased coordination between state and federal meat inspection programs—and all public health partners—will become even more important.

Expect not just more, but better communication and outreach from USDA.

CONCLUSION

In closing, I want to thank AFDO and its members for all of your efforts to make our food supply the safest in the world. We have room for improvement, but we have a strong system in place. That's due in part to the work AFDO does every day.

Let's build on our successful relationship and others like it as we move into the next century of food safety.

With that, I'd like to take your questions.