2004 NARMS Retail Meat Report Posted

October 4, 2006 — 

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine (FDA-CVM) has posted the 2004 National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) Retail Meat Reporton its website. NARMS is an on-going surveillance system to evaluate the significance of antimicrobial resistance in the food chain.

This annual report is the result of a collaborative effort involving FDA/CVM, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and participating FoodNet laboratories. Meat samples (chicken breast, ground turkey, ground beef, and pork chops) are collected at retail outlets located in the 10 states with FoodNet labs (California, Colorado, Connecticut, Georgia, New York, Maryland, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and New Mexico) and are cultured for the presence of selected organisms including Salmonella, Campylobacter, Enterococcus and E. coli. These cultures are then forwarded to FDA/CVM for confirmation and antimicrobial resistance testing.

The pork samples collected exhibited the lowest percentage of culture positives for each of the selected organisms ranging from 0.3% for Campylobacter up to a high of 84.5% for Enterococcus. Less than 1.0% of the pork samples cultured positive for Salmonella and 48.5% were positive for E. coli.

Source:
FDA/CVM, NARMS Retail Meat Annual Report, 2004