FSA publishes new plan to tackle campylobacter

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has outlined a new strategy to reduce the number of people getting ill from campylobacter.

Campylobacter is the most common cause of food poisoning in the UK, thought to be responsible for about 460,000 cases of food poisoning, 22,000 hospitalisations and 110 deaths each year, and a significant proportion of these cases come from poultry.

Reducing cases of campylobacter is the FSA’s top food safety priority but monitoring shows there is no evidence of change in the proportion of the most highly contaminated chickens since 2008.

In a new paper, the agency sets out how it expects industry to focus its actions to:

• continue to improve the effectiveness of biosecurity measures on farms to prevent flock colonisation with campylobacter
• ensure that steps involved in slaughter and processing are effective in preventing contamination of carcasses
• continue to work on packaging and other initiatives that reduce cross contamination in the consumer and food service kitchen
• develop and implement new interventions that reduce contamination when applied at production scale

Full details can be found on the FSA website.