The Food Safety and Inspection Service gave the market and consumers a boost of confidence after confirming all 30 ground beef samples sent to the National Veterinary Services Laboratories for PCR testing came back with no H5N1 virus particles present. This came as no surprise to Mindy Brashears who served as USDA Under Secretary for Food Safety and is now a Horn Distinguished Professor at Texas Tech University.
“Really your meat is essentially sterile,” Brashears says. “That’s the muscle of the animal and this virus you usually find in the GI tract or in the respiratory system. So, I was not surprised that they didn’t find any in the meat products.”
FSIS is now also testing muscle tissues from culled dairy cattle that were condemned due to systemic pathologies. The results of these tests are yet to be published but are expected soon. Brashears anticipates a negative result.
“In the muscle it really should be essentially sterile when it comes off the animal,” she says. “It does get contaminated from the environment, but the meat industry already takes really high precaution to prevent cross contamination because of food borne pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella. Because of those precautions, I would actually be surprised if it does get into the meat or the food supply.”
If H5N1 is ever detected in beef cattle that meat will also be safe especially if properly cooked, Brashears says.
“All the precautions that consumers are already told to cook your meat, to prevent cross contamination that should also go a long way in killing this pathogen as well,” she adds.
In addition, milk and eggs are also safe due to pasteurization.
The cattle futures rallied in response to the test results after selling off earlier in the week when USDA announced the testing.
“These tests are what has been holding the market down,” says Scott Varilek, Kooima Kooima Varilek Trading. “That’s been the question – is it going to be in the beef or not? You know we import so much beef that gets ground up for ground beef that it could have been Australian for all I know.”
He says the other good news is during all this cash cattle trade has not faltered due to tight supplies.
“Earlier in the week there were two days before we knew this negative USDA test that we traded $187 kind of under the radar,” Varilek adds.
Plus, beef exports were a marketing year high Thursday morning at 22,500 metric tons, signaling international customers are confident the U.S. beef is safe.
