Microbiological Guidelines

Food safety regulators face a daunting task: crafting food safety performance standards and systems that continue in the tradition of using the best available science to protect the health of the American public, while working within an increasingly antiquated and fragmented regulatory framework. Current food safety standards have been set over a period of years and under diverse circumstances, based on a host of scientific, legal, and practical constraints. Scientific Criteria to Ensure Safe Food lays the groundwork for creating new regulations that are consistent, reliable, and ensure the best protection for the health of American consumers. This book addresses the biggest concerns in food safetyâ€"including microbial disease surveillance plans, tools for establishing food safety criteria, and issues specific to meat, dairy, poultry, seafood, and produce. It provides a candid analysis of the problems with the current system, and outlines the major components of the task at hand: creating workable, streamlined food safety standards and practices.

This invaluable handbook provides practical working guidance for those involved in producing, using and interpreting microbiological criteria in the food and catering industries and brings together microbiological criteria derived from the practical experience of the authors, and existing guidelines and standards. Written by professional food microbiologists with wide experience and backed by the independent and dependable reputation of the Institute of Food Science & Technology, it discusses definitions, derivation and limitations of microbiological criteria, and sets out tables for different commodities and technologies. This latest edition has been updated to reflect recently developed microbiological methods, changes to taxonomy, inclusion of recently emerged pathogens and a brief description of recently developed processing technologies.

Food plays an essential part in everyday life. Food should be tasty, healthy, sustainable and preferably not too expensive. But food should also be safe and with sufficient guarantees on maintaining good quality aspects until the end of shelf life. The various actors in the food supply chain have an interest in verifying the expected quality and safety by means of microbiological analyses of food. Measurement brings knowledge and microbiological guidelines help in the decision-making process for judging the acceptability of food or food production processes. The present handbook provides microbiological guidelines and current applicable EU legal criteria (status 1.1.2018) for a wide range of food categories (dairy, meat, seafoods, plant-based foods, bakery products, composite foods, shelf-stable food, water) and subcategories therein, based upon the type of food processing and intrinsic characteristics of the foods. This book can be consulted to provide quick answers on the expected microbiological contamination of foodstuff. It can help in interpretation of test results in assessing good (hygienic) practices in the production of food, determining the shelf life and ensuring food safety. The handbook also presents definitions of the wide variety of foodstuffs available and some reflections on, in particular, food safety issues or the on-going debate for some food items in assessing microbial quality. This book provides crucial information about food safety, for the use of students and professionals. EXTRACT "First we eat, then we do everything else" M.F.K. Fisher Food plays an important part in everyday life. But when being a food scientist or in the food business, food gets to be an even bigger part of your life. Our team at the Food Microbiology and Food Preservation research group (FMFP-UGent) at Ghent University during its academic tasks in education, research, scientific activities at committees, but also in interaction with many food companies and stakeholders in the food supply chain in projects or contract work, has built up considerable expertise on the microbiological analysis of a large variety of foodstuffs. Being situated in Ghent, and thus close to Brussels, the heart of Europe, we intrinsically have to understand and deal with legal EU criteria or action limits. The latter is the reason why this book is mainly oriented towards inclusion or making reference to EU legal microbiological criteria for foodstuffs as well. ABOUT THE AUTHORS The main author, Prof. Mieke Uyttendaele, leads, together with Prof. Frank Devlieghere, the Food Microbiology and Food Preservation Research Group (FMFP-UGent) at Ghent University, Belgium. Her teaching and research area covers aspects of microbiological analysis of foods, food safety and food hygiene. She has built over twenty years of experience by executing, initiating and coordinating various projects in this research discipline dealing with sampling and testing to collect baseline data on the microbial contamination of foods, looking into the virulence of food-borne pathogens, elaborating challenge testing to study the behavior of food-borne pathogens. All this information serves as an input for quality assurance and microbial risk assessment to support food safety decision-making and setting microbiological criteria. She was/is the promotor of more than 25 Ph.D students (including EU and non-EU citizens). Throughout her career, Prof. Uyttendaele has published more than 270 peer reviewed scientific papers, authored several book chapters and presented at numerous international Conferences/Workshops. Throughout the years she has also used her scientific expertise in interpretation of test results for analyses obtained in routine monitoring or analysis executed at the food service lab at FMFP-UGent.

This groundbreaking report from the National Research Council provides a thorough examination of the role of microbiological criteria in ensuring the safety of foods and food ingredients. Based on the latest scientific research, this volume offers practical recommendations for improving food safety standards and safeguarding public health. An essential resource for food scientists, policymakers, and anyone concerned with food safety. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

The second edition of Microorganisms in Foods 7: Microbiological Testing in Food Safety Management updates and expands on information on the role of microbiological testing in modern food safety management systems. After helping the reader understand the often confusing statistical concepts underlying microbiological sampling, the second edition explores how risk assessment and risk management can be used to establish goals such as a “tolerable levels of risk,” Appropriate Levels of Protection, Food Safety Objectives or Performance Objectives for use in controlling foodborne illness. Guidelines for establishing effective management systems for control of specific hazards in foods are also addressed, including new examples for pathogens and indicator organisms in powdered infant formula, Listeria monocytogenes in deli-meats, enterohemorrhagic Escherichia coli in leafy green vegetables, viruses in oysters and Campylobacter in poultry. In addition, a new chapter on application of sampling concept to microbiological methods, expanded chapters covering statistical process control, investigational sampling, environmental sampling, and alternative sampling schemes. The respective roles of industry and government are also explored, recognizing that it is through their collective actions that effective food safety systems are developed and verified. Understanding these systems and concepts can help countries determine whether imported foods were produced with an equivalent level of protection. Microorganisms in Foods 7 is intended for anyone using microbiological testing or setting microbiological criteria, whether for governmental food inspection and control, or industrial applications. It is also intended for those identifying the most effective use of microbiological testing in the food supply chain. For students in food science and technology, this book provides a wealth of information on food safety management principles used by government and industry, with many references for further study. The information was prepared by the International Commission on Microbiological Specifications for Foods (ICMSF). The ICMSF was formed in response to the need for internationally acceptable and authoritative decisions on microbiological limits for foods in international commerce. The current membership consists of fifteen food microbiologists from twelve countries, drawn from government, universities, and food processing and related industries.

With the help of leading Quality Assurance (QA) and Quality Control (QC) microbiology specialists in Europe, a complete set of guidelines on how to start and implement a quality system in a microbiological laboratory has been prepared, supported by the European Commission through the Measurement and Testing Programme. The working group included food and water microbiologists from various testing laboratories, universities and industry, as well as statisticians and QA and QC specialists in chemistry. This book contains the outcome of their work. It has been written with the express objective of using simple but accurate wording so as to be accessible to all microbiology laboratory staff. To facilitate reading, the more specialized items, in particular some statistical treatments, have been added as an annex to the book. All QA and QC tools mentioned within these guidelines have been developed and applied by the authors in their own laboratories. All aspects dealing with reference materials and interlaboratory studies have been taken in a large part from the projects conducted within the BCR and Measurement and Testing Programmes of the European Commission. With so many different quality control procedures, their introduction in a laboratory would appear to be a formidable task. The authors recognize that each laboratory manager will choose the most appropriate procedures, depending on the type and size of the laboratory in question. Accreditation bodies will not expect the introduction of all measures, only those that are appropriate for a particular laboratory. Features of this book: • Gives all quality assurance and control measures to be taken, from sampling to expression of results • Provides practical aspects of quality control to be applied both for the analyst and top management • Describes the use of reference materials for statistical control of methods and use of certified reference materials (including statistical tools).