TORONTO — There is an international effort to lower the level of food borne illnesses caused by a host of micro-organisms that get into people’s guts and wreak havoc.
In Canada, ongoing tests and surveillance of meat products and processing plants show low levels of troublesome bugs like listeria, salmonella and E. coli, said Martin Appelt, national policy manager for the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.
“The goal is to get an over-arching comfort level on what the prevalence is by and large in facilities in the country,” he said at a technical symposium sponsored by the Canadian Meat Council in Toronto Oct. 3-4.
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“By and large we see a reduction, we see a downward trend in the prevalence,” he said.
More data would help and it is probably time to change the way meat is inspected, he said.
“In meat inspection we still operate in the mindset from 1907 where a large focus is on hands-on inspection,” he said. Visual inspections note lesions and flaws but no one can see harmful micro-organisms.
He favours more testing. More precise tests are finding a host of micro-organisms and can identify different strains of bacteria, some of which are benign while others could be fatal.
In addition, the Public Health Agency of Canada has been surveying farms and retailers since 2005 at two sites in the Fraser Valley of British Columbia and the Waterloo area in Ontario.
The C-Enternet initiative collects information and is finding micro-organisms on farms and in stores. Prevalence levels are consistently low, said Dr. Frank Pollari of the centre for food borne, environmental and zoonotic infectious diseases within the agency.
The targets are salmonella, campylobacter, E. coli O157:H7, shigella, yersina enterocolitica, giardia, cryptosporidium and listeria.
Samples are collected from manure and water on about 30 farms that could have beef, swine, dairy, broilers or layers.
Each week meat samples are taken from four or five grocery stores in the regions.
They have found very low levels of campylobacter on about 80 percent of the swine farms. Most was campylobacter coli, which is less harmful.
Positive salmonella samples were found in about 30 percent of the samples but at retail outlets, rates in pork were between three to five percent.
They looked for listeria in all the commodities on the retail side and found it was there at a rate of about 10 percent across the board.
Chicken manure had the highest prevalence of salmonella and they also found about 30 percent of the breasts had some traces of it.
They also looked at ground chicken, nuggets and ground turkey where presence of salmonella was higher.
