Promoting Food Safety Research and Collaboration

Introduction: The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) is the public health agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.  FSIS is responsible for the safety of meat, poultry, egg products and Siluriformes (catfish). While FSIS is not a research organization, FSIS relies on research outcomes to guide policy and program direction.

Purpose: To identify and communicate opportunities for high impact food safety research, FSIS maintains an up to date list of research priorities.  This list may be useful to researchers who are preparing grants for submission to agencies that fund food safety research, researchers with resources to conduct such research and/or research funding organizations.  FSIS also promotes high impact food safety research through collaborations with food safety researchers

Methods: Research Priorities are communicated to the food safety research community via the FSIS website, presentations at scientific meetings and presentations/seminars at universities and other food safety research organizations. Collaborations may include sharing biological materials (e.g. microbial isolates, product samples) and data.  Researchers interested in discussing FSIS Research Priorities and/or pursuing collaborative research should contact the FSIS Scientific Liaison (ScientificLiaison@fsis.usda.gov).

Results: Recent collaborations include identification of Shiga toxin producing E. coli in FSIS regulated beef, identification of food outbreak enabling phenotypic and genotypic traits of pathogen strains, development of techniques to reduce pathogen concentrations in livestock, determination of nitrosamines in cured bacon and determination of pharmacokinetics of perfluro environmental contaminants in steers. 

Significance: The FSIS Research Priorities and collaboration process has spawned more than 60 collaborative research studies with university, government, and industry food safety researchers.