Call for mandatory disclosure of pathogen test results

Calls for mandatory disclosure of pathogen test results by UK companies have followed the creation of a US food safety working group after the salmonella outbreak linked to contaminated peanut butter there.

Speaking at a meeting of the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA’s) Advisory Committee on the Microbiological Safety of Food (ACMSF) last week, Dr Bernard Rowe, a consultant to Tesco and former director of the Division of Gastrointestinal Infections at the Central Public Health Laboratories, repeated his call for the mandatory disclosure of private conducted laboratory test results.

Rowe said such a requirement had been given additional weight by the salmonella incident in the US, linked to contamination at the Peanut Corporation of America’s (PCA’s) Blakely facility in Georgia from which positive tests had not been disclosed to the US Food and Drug Administration. This had led to proposals to change the law in the US to make disclosure of results mandatory, said Rowe.
He argued that disclosure should also be made mandatory in the UK. He described failure to disclose adverse test results as “a serious problem for this country”.
Giving evidence to a US House of Representatives sub-committee on Energy & Commerce recently, Kellogg president and chief executive officer, David Mackay said: ”The PCA situation has shown that if a company chooses to ignore even basic food safety principles, food safety systems and protections can be compromised, whether those are individual company systems or the US food safety system generally.”
PCA was a supplier to Kellogg, which had to recall 7M cases of its products because of potential contamination, at a cost of about $65-70M.
Among a number of recommendations for enhancements to the US food safety system, Mackay called for the establishment of risk analysis and food safety plans. He said: “The plan should document appropriate preventative controls and verification steps.
“In particular, manufacturers of high-risk foods should be obligated to monitor their manufacturing environments for salmonella, to keep a record of all salmonella positive test results and their corrective actions, and to make these records available during an FDA inspection.”
Most importantly, he added: “By requiring disclosure of positive salmonella test results during inspection, the FDA can assess how the company responded and whether the appropriate corrective actions were taken.”
Responding to Rowe’s call, Dr Judith Hilton, head of microbiological safety at the FSA said: “We have been considering this in the follow up to Cadbury​ [which had a salmonella contamination incident in 2006] and a similar incident that followed it.” However, she said that following developments, including further work on incident prevention, the FSA was “still considering what the best thing to do is”. Hilton added: “At the moment we are concentrating on incident prevention work.”
Another ACMSF committee member, Sainsbury’s chief microbiologist Alec Kyriakides, remarked that while there might be the “odd occasion” on which important information was not disclosed, “the vast majority of industry does disclose information on isolates that might be a public health problem”