A Risk Assessment of Salmonella Enteritidis in Eggs and Egg Products. A. Hogue, E. Ebel, A. Baker, and W. Schlosser, United States Department of Agriculture, 1400 Independence Avenue S.W., Mail Stop 3811, Washington, D.C. 20250; R. Morales, University of Maryland, College Park, MD; R. Whiting, Food and Drug Administration of Health and Human Services; and R. McDowell, United States Department of Agriculture, 1400 Independence Avenue S.W., Mail Stop 3811, Washington, D.C. 20250
The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) began a comprehensive risk assessment of Salmonella enterica, serotype Enteritidis in December, 1996, in response to an increasing number of human illnesses associated with the consumption of shell eggs. The object of this risk assessment were to: establish the unmitigated risk of foodborne illness from this agent, identify and evaluate potential risk reduction strategies, identify data needs, and prioritize future data collection efforts. A comparison of the total number of illnesses due to Salmonella Enteritidis positive eggs predicted from national public health surveillance shows substantial overlap between these two independently derived distributions. This is the first complete farm to table risk assessment for a microbial foodborne pathogen. The methodology used proved to be useful in this assessment and has potential to guide other microbial pathogen risk assessments.
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