Foster Farms, the California-based company linked to an outbreak of multi-drug resistant Salmonella Heidelberg that sickened 634 people in 2013 and 2014, is the latest major chicken producer to go antibiotic-free. The company announced Monday that it is introducing two new lines of antibiotic-free chicken for major retailers in the Western U.S. The new Foster Farms Certified Organic and Foster Farms Simply Raised chickens are produced without any antibiotics. Foster Farms also announced that it has already eliminated antibiotics that are critical to human medicine from all of its chicken production and is working to eliminate the use of all human antibiotics “except in those instances where the clinical health of a flock is at risk.” The company said it will continue to use animal-only antibiotics when needed for conventional flocks, and that an independent auditor will ensure the company sticks with the new objectives. The company says the move makes it the largest producer of USDA-certified organic and antibiotic-free chicken in the West. “Our company is committed to responsible growing practices that help preserve the effectiveness of antibiotics for human health and medicine,” said Ron Foster, CEO and president of Foster Farms. “We take a holistic approach to antibiotic stewardship.” The Foster Farms changes come about a month after Tyson Foods, the largest poultry producer in the U.S., announced that it would strive to quit using human antibiotics in its chicken flocks by the end of September 2017. Last September, Perdue Foods said it has not used antibiotics for growth promotion since 2007 and doesn’t use any human antibiotics in any of its feed. Unlike Perdue and Tyson Foods, Foster Farms has not set a timeline for ending the routine use of medically important antibiotics. The Keep Antibiotics Working coalition said that unless Foster Farms is clearer about that timeline and some of the other details of its use policy, the company’s efforts fall short of the others’.
Lydia Zuraw is a graduate of Northwestern University with a bachelor's from the Medill School of Journalism. She was born and raised in the suburbs of Baltimore and lived in Illinois, Scotland and Washington state before returning to the East Coast.
The 2-year-old petition from Animal Partisan to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), calling upon the agency to share its federal jurisdiction over animal abuse with state
The Food and Drug Administration uses import alerts to enforce U.S. food safety regulations for food from foreign countries. The agency updates and modifies the alerts as needed.
Recent
The USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has updated its public calendar to provide information about its meetings in March and April.
It lists meetings held by the
IAEA and FAO are to hold an event next year focusing on the use of nuclear technologies for food safety.
The International Symposium on Food Safety and Control will take
Editor’s Note: Food Safety News Washington D.C. correspondent Lydia Zuraw for the past two and one half years will after today be found reporting for nonprofit Kaiser Health
The increasing global attention to the threat of antibiotic resistance has spurred research and development of antimicrobial alternatives. Once such alternative is bacteriophages. Bacteriophages are viruses that infect and kill
It’s impossible to say what will be the big food safety story of 2016. The ultimate unpredictable is what foodborne outbreaks will dominate the headlines and how they may
This year saw dozens of well-publicized foodborne illness outbreaks. While many of them were found to have sickened a handful of individuals, a few stood out as especially wide in
