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More meat inspections in April
WASHINGTON (AP)--Stepped-up inspections at some meat and poultry plants are set to begin in April, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture official overseeing the first overhaul of food safety inspections in a decade. The new policy, which was to be announced Feb. 22, is designed to increase scrutiny of processing plants where the threat of E. coli and other germs is high or where past visits have found unsafe practices. Plants with fewer risks and better food-handling records will be inspected less often. The USDA proposes to switch to the new system at about 250 locations, or about 5 percent of the nation's estimated 5,300 processing plants. "We will do this for a long time in these locations until we've had a chance to evaluate how well it's going, where the bumps in the road might be, what we might need to do differently and how training needs to change," said Richard Raymond, the USDA's top food safety official. As many as 1,200 plants might be part of the new system by Jan. 1, Raymond told The Associated Press late Feb. 21. To decide the level of scrutiny a plant should get, the "risk-based" system will consider the type of product and the plant's record of food safety violations. A plant that makes hamburger and has repeated violations would get more inspections. A plant that makes cooked, canned ham and has a clean track record would get less scrutiny. Daily inspections of the plants are required under federal law and would continue, and the changes would apply only to processing plants and not to slaughter plants. 5 Star OK 2/26/07 13 B Date: 2/22/07
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