About 13 per cent of the livestock and poultry feed checked
by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is contaminated with Salmonella
bacteria, even though the CFIA has a standard of zero tolerance.
The CBC in Manitoba is reporting on the situation, citing
Prof. Rick Holley of the University of Manitoba who tested 12 samples the CBC
picked up and found Salmonella in two, a rate of 17 per cent.
Holley said this is a high risk for food poisoning of people,
including from fruit, vegetables and nuts grown on fields where manure has been
spread.
The CBC notes that the Public Health Agency of Canada
reports that an average of about 6,700 cases of Salmonella food poisoning show
up every year.
Paul Mayers, the CFIA’s vice-president of policy and
programs, said the agency takes a risk-based approach.
"If
you have the situation where you have [an animal] that's not susceptible to
salmonella infection, and you have a very low-risk feed, then the corrective
action that's employed may be different than in a [high-risk] situation,"
he told the CBC.
Mayers
said among the most severe corrective actions include product destruction and
mandatory CFIA-issued recalls.
He would
not indicate what the least severe responses would be, but he said a
"corrective action is always required."
Mayers
also declined to give examples of when the CFIA has issued mandatory recalls
for salmonella in animal feed.
But one
Manitoba feed producer told the CBC the CFIA is only concerned with six of the
more than 2,500 strains of salmonella, and it lets the feed enter the market
normally if it doesn't detect one of those six strains.
Melissa
Dumont, director of technical services for the Animal Nutrition Association of
Canada, said she’s not convinced there is the link that Prof. Holley raised and
said Salmonella is “everywhere in the environment” and therefore not surprising
some shows up in animal feeds.
“I can
only speak of the science that I've seen, and right now the link (to human
illnesses) is not evident, if there at all, at this point in time," she said.
