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Food Focus May 2008

Poultry processing industry must meet targets

NZFSA’s Campylobacter in Poultry Risk Management Strategy 2007–2010 includes a raft of activities to combat the country’s high levels of campylobacteriosis. Food Focus regularly reports on progress, the latest being new industry performance targets which are now being enforced

NZFSA has adopted a whole-of-food-chain approach to fighting campylobacteriosis. The processes and procedures in place at each stage between rearing and eating poultry are under close scrutiny.

NZFSA’s Poultry Campylobacter Performance Target (CPT) programme has now set specific sampling requirements and regulatory limits for poultry premises producing broiler chickens. This programme is part of the National Microbiological Database (NMD) programme, which sets sampling and testing regimes to monitor compliance with regulatory requirements around the food safety status of meat (sheep, beef, deer, goats, ostrich, emu and poultry).

[See the Animal Products (National Microbiological Database Specifications) Notice 2008]

From March 2007 poultry premises have been participating in the NMD Campylobacter programme. From 11 February 2008 this was expanded to include Campylobacter limits.

Sampling under the poultry NMD programme will have regulatory responses applied from 7 April 2008. Premises must comply with the regulatory responses if their results exceed the limits specified.

What is required of poultry premises

All premises processing broiler chickens must report to the NMD every processing week. All non-processing days must also be reported to the NMD.

For poultry processors, the whole carcass is sampled using the rinse method and there is additional sampling for caeca (the blind-gut of poultry broilers).

The operator must ensure three carcasses are collected each processing day for standard throughput and five carcasses are collected on one processing day each processing week for very low throughput. (Very low throughput (VLT) poultry premises are those that slaughter product from one million (1,000,000) birds or fewer per annum.)

The operator must communicate production schedules and any variation to production schedules to their laboratory at the earliest opportunity.

Poultry broiler caeca samples must be taken each processing day (for both standard throughput and VLT premises) from 10 birds for each cut (ie each time birds are removed from a shed for slaughter). The required number of samples must be taken.

Samples that record counts higher than the specified limits will be recorded as failures. There are four classes of CPT failure:

1. high count failure

2. moving window failure

3. quarterly failure

4. Campylobacter management plan failure.

A response number (1 to 5, where 1 is a low failure rate) will be generated from cumulative failures and the operator will be expected to initiate prescribed corrective actions immediately, depending on the response number. If responses show no sign of improvement, NZFSA may consider premises closure.

NZFSA’s Campylobacter in Poultry Risk Management Strategy 2007–2010.

New Zealand’s monthly campylobacteriosis rates

Source: ESR