Cutting 80 Percent of Pathogen Testing for Produce, USDA Begins Shutdown of MDP

By Helena Bottemiller | November 13, 2012 After months of uncertainty over the future of the program, the Agricultural Marketing Service's Microbiological Data Program, which tests produce for disease causing pathogens like E. coli O157:H7, Salmonella, and Listeria, has officially gone into shutdown mode, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official confirmed Tuesday. Department officials told states that participate in the $4.5 million program to stop pulling produce samples on Friday to "ensure an orderly shutdown of the program by December 31." According to an analysis by Food Safety News, ending MDP will eliminate more than 80 percent of public produce testing for pathogens. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which has jurisdiction over the safety of produce, also has a produce testing program, but it is significantly smaller. "This "tiny" program was launched in 2001 simply to collect data about fresh produce contamination, but it now regularly sparks produce recalls when participating state labs find pathogens. Perhaps more importantly, the labs upload any positive test results to the Centers for Disease Control's PulseNet, which helps public health officials link foodborne illness cases to food products. MDP is also the only federal program that tests for non-O157 E. coli strains like the one that caused the deadly, high profile sprout outbreak in Germany last year," read the report, published in July. One AMS official said MDP was shutting down "due to budget cuts by Congress." While it's true Congress didn't request funding for MDP, the Obama administration actually did not seek funding for the program in their last budget request, calling it a "lower-priority program because it is has a low impact and is not central to the core mission of AMS, which is to facilitate the competitive and efficient marketing of agricultural products." The produce industry has long complained that USDA's produce testing program is just too slow to do any good for public health — by the time recalls are announced to the public and media the highly perishable produce products are often expired or have already been consumed. The United Fresh Produce Association has lobbied for years to eliminate MDP. The group says they support moving produce testing to FDA, but there's no word on whether FDA is willing, or able, to fill the void left by MDP. There's also no evidence that FDA is faster at sampling, testing, and recalling than MDP was. During a Food Safety News investigation last summer, it took FDA over a month to come up with testing numbers and the agency was unable to list the number of recalls sparked by the their testing program because the numbers weren't easily captured in the agency's data system. State health officials argue that the surveillance MDP provided is important, even if contamination is discovered after consumers consume the product, because the results shed light on an entire commodity's food safety record. "It's not a preventative program," said Kristi McCallum, the Microbiology Program Manager at the Colorado Department of Agriculture, last summer. "But this is the only program that does surveillance testing for produce." Though the states are no longer pulling new produce samples, they are still testing samples that were already collected and adding the results to their database, according to AMS. When asked if USDA officials were coordinating with FDA on the program cut, an AMS official said discussions were ongoing, but declined to elaborate further.  See below for an overview of MDP and FDA produce testing © Food Safety News More Headlines from Food Politics » Tags: FDA, MDP, microbiology, United Fresh, USDA