I’ve been both interested and encouraged over the past couple of days, hearing what other countries have been doing to reduce levels of campylobacter in chicken. Along with many of my colleagues, I’ve been at an international conference we’ve been hosting in London.
Levels of campylobacter in UK chicken are too high. Around 65% of shop-bought chicken has this food bug and it makes about 300,000 of us ill every year. Our aim is to work with industry to develop a range of new interventions targeted at different points along the food chain and, as always, we are taking an evidence-based approach to develop these. Finding out what has worked in other countries is the obvious first step.
There is no shortage of possible treatments that can reduce campylobacter contamination of chicken, but finding the ones that will work for the UK is what we are working on. While some approaches will present regulatory problems, others may not be very palatable for consumers.
In the USA and New Zealand, a number of antimicrobial treatments are in use successfully. Not all are currently permitted in the European Union but we should keep an open mind because this could change. One such treatment involves washing the chicken in lactic acid, already a common component of food, which has potential benefits for food safety. Other countries have used methods such as steam treatment and freezing – but would we consider the treated chicken to be ‘fresh’? I’ve also been hearing about the pros and cons of saline washes and ‘cold pasteurisation’– irradiation in other words.
Over the next year we will be researching and exploring attitudes to find the methods that are acceptable to everyone – producers, processors, retailers and consumers. And we will be working closely with industry. Their trial and evaluation of different interventions is key – they are the ones who will ultimately be putting them into practice, after all.