USDA Repeals New Poultry Salmonella Standards

Salmonella is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 1.35 million Americans get sick from salmonella each year, and of those cases 26,500 people end up in the hospital and 400 die. Salmonella can live on many different foods, however, the most common source in the U.S. is chicken and turkey, which account for nearly a quarter of all outbreaks.

The Biden administration proposed new standards to keep poultry tainted with the most dangerous types of salmonella off the market, which the Trump administration repealed last week. While the framework was not perfect — food safety advocates thought it should go further and small meatpacking plants felt overburdened — it would have created real salmonella penalties for powerful poultry corporations for the first time in over two decades.

“The big guys didn’t want this,” says Thomas Gremillion, food policy director at the Consumer Federation of America. “With very rare exceptions, they are not held accountable for making people sick, they are externalizing the cost of foodborne illness onto the public. This rule would have forced them to internalize that cost a little bit.”

The current salmonella regulatory system for poultry is ineffective. While the percentage of chicken products carrying salmonella has declined, salmonella infections from chicken have increased over the past ten years.

USDA grades poultry processing plants based on the percentage of products that test positive for salmonella. A 2001 court decision prevented USDA from shutting down meat processing plants that failed federal salmonella standards, rendering them unenforceable. Today, USDA merely publishes a list of plants that are not in compliance. As of the latest USDA data, nearly 14% of tested poultry plants failed to meet federal salmonella standards.

This standard focuses on the presence of salmonella in a plant, but not the load of salmonella on poultry, nor the type of salmonella present. There are hundreds of types of salmonella, but only a few cause most human illnesses, while one of the most common types found in USDA sampling, Salmonella Kentucky, is not as dangerous.

Consumer advocates and some chicken processors asked the Biden administration to create a more enforceable and risk-based standard. Advocates point to the success of E. coli regulations in beef, which reduced E. coli illness by 40%, and salmonella standards in Europe, which cut salmonellosis in half over five years. Both reforms banned the sale of meat containing the most dangerous serotypes of bacteria. Europe also set standards and targets to reduce salmonella levels on poultry farms, especially poultry breeding farms, to cut down salmonella at the source before it gets to the slaughterhouse.

The Biden administration’s new salmonella framework focused mostly on preventing tainted products from entering the market by creating a new sampling and verification program. If poultry products tested positive for a certain amount of salmonella or any amount of six particularly virulent types of salmonella, they could not be sold.

The Trump administration withdrew this proposal with little justification. USDA’s press office told CIDRAP news that “The Biden-era proposal would have imposed significant financial and operational burdens on American businesses and consumers, failing to consider an effective and achievable approach to address Salmonella in poultry products."

Advocates think the Trump administration withdrew the rule to help big business. “It’s pretty obvious that this administration is focused on increasing corporate profits,” argues Sarah Sorscher, director of regulatory affairs at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. Vertically integrated chicken giants have been major Trump donors: Pilgrim’s Pride, the U.S.-based poultry arm of JBS, was the biggest corporate donor to President Trump’s inauguration fund, contributing $5 million. Tyson Foods also contributed $1 million and the owner of Mountaire Farms was a top campaign contributor.

This framework would have cost industry, but Sorscher thinks large chicken corporations could afford to comply, just as beef processors adapted to similar E. coli rules. “It would have cost fractions of a penny per pound to invest in this rule, which was going to reduce illness for consumers, and industry wasn’t prepared to make that investment,” Sorscher says. “It shows you how consumers cannot rely on industry to make these decisions for itself.”

Advocates for small meatpacking plants more justifiably contended that the new standards could hurt them and the farmers they serve. “Regulating salmonella in the currently proposed manner has the very real potential to regulate many independent hatcheries, poultry growers, and small and very small plants out of existence,” wrote the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC), in their comment to USDA on the proposed framework. The alliance of over 140 organizations advocated for scale-appropriate regulations, such as monitoring proportional to production volumes and government cost-sharing to support implementation for small poultry plants. The proposed rule removed one of the more contentious requirements from which NSAC sought a small plant exemption, but it otherwise did not have many exceptions or supports for small plants.

NSAC also advocated for more salmonella intervention at the hatchery level, highlighting how big players up the supply chain can change salmonella levels across the industry. The USDA does not have the authority to regulate salmonella control practices on poultry farms, but upstream salmonella control played a significant role in Europe’s successful illness reduction.

Poultry breeding farms or hatcheries are particularly important because salmonella can transfer vertically from parents to chicks. Vaccinating parent chickens has been linked to decreases in salmonella illness. Just two companies, Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress (owned by Tyson), control 90% of the elite pedigree breeding stock from which all U.S. broilers descend. According to Gremillion, some chicken executives have complained that they struggle to buy breeding flocks that do not have salmonella. Aviagen and Cobb-Vantress do vaccinate their breeding stock against some types of salmonella, but Sorscher says the companies are secretive about which ones.

We know that chicken breeders, integrators, and the USDA can work together to eradicate certain types of salmonella because they have largely done so for select serotypes that make chickens sick. “We don’t really have the same thing for serotypes that make humans sick,” Sorscher says. “Industry has not prioritized human health; they prioritized their profits.”