The UK’s Farmers Weekly Interactive (FWI) is reporting that the British Poultry Council wants the government’s Food Standards Agency to join it in setting up a technical group to come up with “cost effective measures for tackling campylobacter.
FWI quotes the Council’s Ted Wright as saying: “Foodborne illness caused by campylobacter infection is still a problem. We know it is a widespread bacterium and that the chicken’s gut provides an ideal environment for it to multiply. We are keen to work further to reduce campylobacter on poultrymeat.”
“While indoor rearing can help reduce the incidence, greater scientific understanding is needed of how the organism gets into flocks. There have been several joint research projects between FSA and industry over many years, but we need to distil these findings into interventions that work.
“As Andrew Wadge of the FSA said recently, we need to look at what cost-effective measures we can put in place between the farm and the fork, which will intervene to eliminate camplylobacter,” said Mr Wright
“Therefore, we want to set-up a joint technical group to pull these together. There’s a lot to do in this area, but we can hope that one day we will have campylobacter under control, at least in the poultry sector, in the same way that we now control salmonella.”