Salmonella test approved for poultry plants
poultry plants by a department ofagriculture committee.
Strategic Diagnostics announced that its new RapidChek Select Salmonella testing product has been approved by thetechnical committee of the National Poultry Improvement Plan (NPIP), a joint effort to improve foodsafety by industry and the US Department of Agriculture.
The company also announced full commercial adoption of the method by four food processing companies within the first four weeks of commercialization, each with an average annual account value of $50,000.
NPIP consists of a variety of programs intended to prevent and control egg-transmitted, hatchery-disseminated poultry diseases. One such program is monitoring environmental samples for the detection of Salmonella species in poultry hatcheries.
NPIP samples tend to be high in non-Salmonella, background bacteria, which interferes in the performance of many rapid detection methods that compete withStrategic Diagnostics' RapidChek system.
Such interferences produce costly, high "false positive" results not seen with theRapidChek method, Strategic Diagnostics claims.
Strategic Diagnostics said it invented the technology as a result of direct input from NPIP and other customers experiencing test specificity and sensitivity issues in their Salmonella testing programs.
"Its ability to generate exceptionally accurate results in the most challenging samples, and to do so in a highly cost effective manner, continues to earn us new business opportunities and industry recognition,"stated Matthew Knight, president and chief executive.
The NPIP market segment has an estimated value of $6m. The overall domestic market for Salmonellatesting is estimated at $74m annually, the company stated.
The National Poultry Improvement Plan was set up to promote new technology that the agency foundto be effective in cutting pathogen contamination of poultry and poultry products.
