• Washington Post, Wednesday, July 8, 2009 10:34 AM

The Obama administration yesterday outlined a variety of measures to prevent the spread of salmonella, a bacterium that causes more than 1 million illnesses each year in the U.S., Jane Black and Ed O'Keefe report. They are the first steps toward overhauling food safety regulations that have been blamed for a stream of food recalls and related illnesses and were recommended by a working group created in March to emphasize prevention, enforcement and improving the government's response time to such incidents.

The FDA will now require that egg producers test regularly for salmonella and buy chicks from suppliers who do the same. Eggs will have to be refrigerated on the farm and during shipment now, too. The USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service is also developing new standards to reduce salmonella in poultry. And the FDA and USDA also announced plans to tackle E. coli.

Food safety advocates were generally pleased with the new initiatives but some cautioned that programs must be carefully crafted and not "cater to the largest industrialized producers and processors of food," as Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, put it.

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