The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) will exclude current commercial vaccine subtypes of Salmonella confirmed in FSIS raw poultry samples from the calculation used to categorize establishments under the raw poultry Salmonella performance standards. Effective April 1, 2024, the announcement was made in FSIS’s Constituent Update.
“We welcome this science-based change and have advocated for it for nearly a decade,” noted Ashley Peterson, Ph.D., NCC senior vice president of scientific and regulatory affairs. “Companies will no longer be penalized for using a Salmonella vaccine should the vaccine strain make it to the processing facility and be detected by FSIS. As such, this decision could encourage even more companies to use a Salmonella vaccine.”
The decision was made after collecting data from 11 pilot projects that tested different strategies for Salmonella control in poultry products.
In 2021, FSIS announced that, as part of its ongoing efforts to reduce foodborne illnesses caused by Salmonella, it would invite poultry processors to submit proposals for Salmonella control pilot projects. FSIS would then analyze the data to determine whether it supports changes to existing FSIS Salmonella control strategies.
Since March 2023, project proposals from nine different establishments have been approved by FSIS.
FSIS examined Salmonella detection and serotype data from flocks vaccinated with a modified live Salmonella vaccine at pre- and post-intervention points in the participating establishments. The data indicated that vaccine strains can occasionally be found in raw poultry products even when the vaccine is used as directed on the label.
FSIS’s current policy of counting such strains as a positive result in performance categorization may discourage the use of vaccination as a tool to control Salmonella. To remove barriers to using these valuable pre-harvest interventions, FSIS plans to exclude current commercial vaccine subtypes confirmed in FSIS raw poultry samples from the calculation used to categorize establishments under the raw poultry Salmonella performance standards.
