The US Department of Agriculture has released an administrative directive outlining additional steps to be taken by USDA inspectors to ensure that establishments producing ready-to-eat meat and poultry products are taking the necessary steps to prevent contamination with Listeria monocytogenes.

The directive is a result of last month's announcements calling for a strengthening of current Listeria protocols and testing programmes. Dr. Elsa Murano, the USDA's undersecretary for food safety, outlined the directive during a scientific summit held in Washington, DC, earlier this week.

"This directive is an aggressive and targeted approach to further reduce the risk of listeriosis from consumption of contaminated ready-to-eat products," Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said. "The actions we are announcing today underscore this Administration's continued commitment to improving public health through scientific enhancements of our inspection process."

Under this directive, plants producing high and medium risk ready-to-eat products (deli-meats and hot dogs) that do not have an evaluated environmental testing regime designed to find and take necessary actions to eliminate Listeria monocytogenes will be placed under an intensified testing programme by the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS).

This programme will consist of increased testing of the final product and testing of food contact surfaces and plant environment. Plants that have an environmental testing programme but do not choose to share these testing data with FSIS on an ongoing basis will also fall under the intensified testing program. As a means of verification, those plants that share complete data from their environmental testing programme with the FSIS will be subject to a targeted testing programme, which consists of final product testing.

"There is a vast amount of data generated through environmental testing by processing facilities. Making it available to the USDA will help our inspectors anticipate problems through proactive analysis of contamination trends at these establishments," said Dr Murano.

In addition to this directive, the FSIS is in the process of completing an extensive, scientific risk assessment on Listeria monocytogenes to determine how the pathogen may contaminate meat products during production and packaging processes.

The risk assessment, in conjunction with a risk ranking on products from retail establishments, will provide important additional data for the Agency to finalise its rulemaking process in the coming months on an effective regulatory approach to reducing Listeria monocytogenes in processing plants producing ready-to-eat products.

The Listeria monocytogenes directive is available on the FSIS's website .