Remarks prepared for delivery by Dr. Richard Raymond, USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety, to the 2006 Food Safety Education Conference, September 27, 2006, Denver, Colorado.

I hope everyone is enjoying themselves. Before I go any further I want to thank Under Secretary Johner and Deputy Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Agriculture Beth Johnson one more time for coming out to support this year's food safety education conference and sharing their unique perspectives on food safety.

It's just this kind of diversity in approaches toward ensuring a safe and wholesome food supply that makes this conference such an important forum. It's a forum for public health officials and others in the food safety community to come together and share the latest science-based food safety findings, principles, practices. It's also the perfect place to discuss and share the communication strategies that are most effective in reaching the general public and hard to reach at-risk audiences.

Just as Under Secretary Johner said earlier, the USDA understands that we can certainly do more together with our food safety partners than we could ever think of doing alone.

As USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety, I oversee the Food Safety and Inspection Service. Most of the time, the attention and emphasis are placed on the last half of the name — Inspection Service. It's understandable. After all, our inspection activities have had a daily effect on nearly every household in America since the 1906 Meat Inspection Act was passed 100 years ago. It's what we do.

But more recently, at FSIS we've been focusing more on the first half of our name — Food Safety — by expanding the reach and impact of our food safety education messages to consumers and at-risk populations. For the next three days, these vital activities, conducted in cooperation with not only other local, state and federal agencies, but also trade, consumer and public health associations, will be taking center stage.

FSIS' own approach to consumer education utilizes traditional and non-traditional methods to foster safer food handling and achieve positive behavior change. This includes teaching everyone the four basics of safe food preparation: Clean, Separate, Cook and Chill. [More information: befoodsafe.gov]

It isn't the message that is in doubt, but how to deliver the message more effectively is the question we are asking here at this conference — I hope we get some answers this week.

These four basics of safe food preparation and other safe food preparation messages are so important because current science just doesn't allow us to be able to guarantee that every raw meat and poultry product that is produced will be germ-free nor that every cooked meat and poultry product will remain germ-free as it makes its way to a consumer's plate. This basic limitation is why FSIS remains determined to get consumers the information they need to help them better protect their families.

As a public health agency, FSIS must strive toward strengthening this important last line of defense. So many things can happen during food preparation, most of them bad, and many of them potentially dangerous — like cross contamination.

But even as we strengthen our education and outreach efforts, I want to assure you that we'll never stop working to enhance the public health protections offered by our nation's food safety regulatory system. We're dedicated to improving our food safety AND inspection service. This isn't an "either/or" proposition.

It's just high time we began to remind people the AND in FSIS means we have a bigger role than JUST inspection. We do want to become known as the public health branch of the USDA.

Risk-Based Systems

As I said before, this conference is focused on food safety education and the challenges we face in that arena, but I do want to speak briefly about our efforts to strengthen our food safety regulatory system. A good grasp of both our food safety education and inspection activities and how they work together in concert is important to fully understanding our farm-to-fork approach to ensuring a safe and wholesome supply of meat, poultry and egg products.

Just as FSIS targets its food safety education efforts toward at-risk audiences, the agency also focuses its inspection resources on the products and facilities that pose the greatest risk to public health. We refer to this as a risk-based approach to inspection.

For example, the 11-step Salmonella initiative that FSIS unveiled in February focuses the agency's Salmonella testing on plants that show the least success in controlling this dangerous pathogen. Our Listeria monocytogenes regulatory sampling program initiated in 2003 was also a risk-based approach to inspection.

In the past year, we've begun work on creating an even more robust risk-based inspection system. What we're after is a common sense, cost-effective public health strategy that best serves the American consumer and the meat and poultry industry by preventing human illness and in turn, protecting those most at-risk from foodborne illnesses. This goal requires that we have the ability to anticipate and quickly respond to food safety challenges before they negatively affect public health.

An enhanced robust risk-based system offers us this ability. It's about having the flexibility to spend our work hours in a smarter way with more time in the plants that need us there the most to help protect the public's health. Ultimately, that's what it's all about, lowering the risk to the public.

Food Safety Successes

I'm happy to report that these risk-based policies, in conjunction with industry's efforts and our vigorous food safety initiatives, have helped to make the meat and poultry supply safer. The best indicators of this success are those that directly relate to pathogen reduction and public health outcomes.

Since 2000, the percentage of regulatory product samples that tested positive for Listeria monocytogenes has fallen by 56 percent so that in 2005, only 0.64 percent of regulatory samples taken were positive for this dangerous pathogen.

The results are even more dramatic for product sampling for E. coli O157:H7, which has declined by nearly 80 percent. Only 0.17 percent of FSIS' samples were positive in fiscal year 2005.

More important than the declines in the product sampling numbers is that we're also seeing dramatic declines in the rate of human illness. Comparing human foodborne illness data from 2005 with 1998 data, E. coli O157:H7 human illness rates are down 29 percent, Listeria monocytogenes is down 32 percent and Campylobacter declined 30 percent.

Initiatives like FSIS' important cooperative relationship with the Department of Health and Human Services' Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's FoodNet and Pulsenet programs have also played a critical role in these declines. They seem like they have been here forever, but in actuality are only 10 years old.

The data we receive from these partnerships helps us to more quickly identify outbreaks and pinpoint sources. We all know, the quicker outbreaks are identified the quicker regulatory actions can be initiated in order to prevent human illness and even death.

These public health successes are a direct reflection of the powerful combination of FSIS' risk-based policies implemented in the past 12 years, and the vital food safety initiatives that the agency and its partners have implemented. However, we can't be satisfied with our past success. Percentages don't mean much if you're the one with a sick child. For you, it's still 100 percent.

That's why we must continue to improve our food safety system for future threats using sound science, before those threats can harm consumers. Key to future improvements is having a more accurate picture of the prevalence of foodborne illnesses and of the people these serious illnesses are affecting.

I want to challenge the public health and medical community here today to commit to improving their reporting of foodborne illnesses. Although foodborne illnesses can be severe or even fatal, milder cases are often not detected through routine surveillance and underreporting of foodborne illnesses is common.

This has serious negative consequences on our ability to understand the food safety environment we are operating in and our ability to obtain the support for the funding needed to combat foodborne illnesses. This information is absolutely necessary in order to create and guide prevention efforts and asses the effectiveness of our food safety regulations.

Closing

With that said, I want to thank you all again for coming to what I hope is just one of many such food safety education conferences. We have a strong food safety system in place, and that's due in large part to the work everyone here does on a daily basis.

But the state of public health is constantly evolving and we must be sure we're evolving with it. We can't afford to let ourselves, our partners or our nation's food safety efforts stagnate. We must constantly be working to enhance our public health protections and the public's awareness of these protections.

Public health is a lot like a bicycle in that if we're not moving forward, then we are in fact falling down. However, when it comes to public health there's no such thing as training wheels. That's why it's so critical that we all work together to create the most effective food safety policies and outreach programs possible.

We all know that we can save lives, and together we'll do just that.