My paper of the day is from a group USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service folks who used a massive outbreak as a baseline for a set of interventions.

Good stuff.

The paper, Intensified Sampling in Response to a Salmonella Heidelberg Outbreak Associated with Multiple Establishments Within a Single Poultry Corporation by Green and colleagues, published online today in Foodborne Pathogens and Disease shows that on-farm and processing interventions matter.

They don’t say it’s Foster Farms, but it’s uh, Foster Farms.

Salmonella percent positive declined from 19.7% to 5.3% during this timeframe as a result of regulatory and company efforts. The company noted that a multihurdle approach to reduce Salmonella in products was taken, including on-farm efforts such as environmental testing, depopulation of affected flocks, disinfection of affected houses, vaccination, and use of various interventions within the establishments over the course of several months.

Less Salmonella is not just about cooking and cross-contamination in the home or a restaurant. Reducing how much Salmonella is introduced into kitchens really matters.