Chicken vaccinations: ‘more work needed’
While acknowledging the investment that poultry producers and research councils were making in trying to tackle the issue, David Gregory, chairman of food safety consultancy Acoura, argued that a vaccination was the “great leap forward” that the industry needed.
“There is no question that the food industry has given campylobacter a great deal of attention, and there are lots of ideas being developed — but there isn't anything available yet that guarantees the safety of the meat product,” Gregory said.
“Right at the core of all of this is that we don't really understand the bacteria. When I studied food science, nobody had heard of it — it's a relatively new organism that behaves very differently to salmonella,” he added.
Vaccination of laying hens
Gregory, who as a former technical director at Marks & Spencer was known for developing food safety and traceability, said it was the vaccination of laying hens that eventually brought salmonella down to controllable levels in the UK.
“The cleaning up of poultry feed and a number of positive hygiene approaches helped, but it was vaccination that largely reduced salmonella in the UK to what is now deemed to be a near acceptable level.” However, he accepted that, on current evidence, campylobacter behaved very differently to salmonella, being more genetically variable.
“We have yet to grasp why this organism behaves the way it does, and why it becomes so apparent at a certain stage of a chicken's life,” said Gregory.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) had recorded a decrease in campylobacter levels in supermarket chicken for two successive quarters. However, last month testing was suspended after it concluded that the increasing practice of removing neck skin on birds by retailers was making the data unreliable.
‘Most contaminated part of the bird’
In a statement, it said: “The way we have conducted the testing for campylobacter levels has been to measure the amount of the bug on the neck skin of the chicken this is because this is generally the most contaminated part of the bird.
“Given that chicken samples now contain varying amounts of neck skin, it makes it difficult for us to compare fairly one retailer with another and to give accurate comparisons with previous quarterly results.”
The FSA plans to publish its final set of data on May 26, but will not be breaking the figures down by retailer. It added that it wouldn't restart the testing programme until it comes up with a method that would provide “clear information on the progress being made by retailers to tackle campylobacter”, which it hoped would be before the end of summer.
