Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) announced key 2017 data concerning its food safety efforts.

2017 highlights include:

• FSIS inspected more than 155 million head of livestock and 9.45 billion poultry carcasses.  FSIS Inspectors also conducted 6.9 million food safety and food defense procedures across 6,500 regulated establishments to ensure that meat, poultry and processed egg products was safe and wholesome.

• FSIS continued its initiatives to modernize operations and inspection systems. In particular, FSIS continued to modernize poultry inspection under the New Poultry Inspection System (NPIS) through its science-based, preventive approach poultry inspection.

• FSIS implemented inspection of Siluriformes fish by transitioning regulatory oversight from the FDA to FSIS, and prevented the entrance of, or removed over, 715,000 pounds of adulterated or ineligible imported Siluriformes product from U.S. commerce.

Looking ahead, FSIS expects to continue to increase its use of whole genome sequencing and to develop key informational tools and resources for inspection personnel.