UK chicken necks and Campylobacter testing

The UK’s Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) target to reduce the number of human cases of Campylobacter poisoning by 100,000 a year has met an unlikely hitch — the amount of neck skin on retail chickens.

“Tackling Campylobacter remains our number one priority. The ultimate test to show whether our campaign is working is to see whether fewer people get ill. That’s why we want to see 100,000 fewer cases of Campylobacter each year from the end of March 2017. So there’s no let-up for industry: we want to see continuing efforts to reduce this bug on our chickens,” said Steve Wearne, director of policy at FSA.

To track their progress the FSA has been running a year-long survey to measure the amount of Campylobacter on chickens bought from shops and supermarkets.

The results of the second quarter of the survey showed 11% of chickens tested positive for the highest level of contamination, down from 19% in October to December 2014.

But now an interesting problem has arisen and upset the testing protocol — a growing number of processors are removing the neck skin from chickens before they are sold. Generally this skin is the most contaminated part of the bird and so the FSA’s protocol for testing for Campylobacter levels was to measure the amount of the bug on this part of the chicken.

This is good news for the consumer because it reduces the amount of Campylobacter on the bird, but it throws into disarray the FSA’s results. Given that chicken samples now contain varying amounts of neck skin, it makes it difficult to compare fairly one retailer with another and to give accurate comparisons with previous quarterly results.

Currently the FSA has decided to suspend the survey for the time being while it looks again at what sort of testing it might do to provide clear information on the progress being made by retailers to tackle Campylobacter.