The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) plans to launch a new approach to its testing for harmful levels of chemical residues in meat, poultry, and egg products. Through its National Residue Program (NRP), FSIS tests for the presence of chemical compounds, including approved (legal) and unapproved (illegal) veterinary drugs, pesticides, hormones, and environmental contaminants that may appear in meat, poultry, and egg products. The new, modern, high-efficiency methods that FSIS has announced will conserve resources and provide useful and reliable results while enabling the Agency to analyze each sample for more chemical compounds than previously possible.

In the past, FSIS would have collected 300 samples from 300 cows and looked for just one chemical at a time. Under the new system, one sample may be tested for as many as 55 pesticide chemicals, nine kinds of antibiotics, various metals, and eventually more than 50 other chemicals.

In all, FSIS will assess more compounds per sample using several multi-residue methods.

FSIS is also revamping its scheduled sampling program to increase the annual number of samples per slaughter class from 300 to 800.

If an establishment has samples containing illegal residue levels, FSIS will notify the Food and Drug Administration, which may review practices of producers supplying the establishment with livestock or poultry, and FSIS may subject the establishment to increased testing and review. PD

—From USDA news release