Under the proposals, open for consultation, poultry processors will only be able to accept poultry from farms that comply with the regulations and they must control food safety hazards during the slaughtering process.

This reflects current industry practices where poultry processors normally own the poultry on the farm and check the farms to ensure good agricultural practices are being followed.

However the new proposals will seek greater control, using for example a HACCP based food safety management system and requiring sufficient records to enable poultry and poultry meat products to be traced.

An assessment of safety standards at all levels of the poultry sector, commissioned prior to the proposals, found that the main hazards were Salmonella and Campylobacter. It also found that greater enforcement was needed at the primary production (breeding farms to the transport of birds to slaughter facilities) and consumer stages of the poultry meat supply chain.

In contrast, the primary production stage prior to breeding farms and the processing and retail stages are not considered to contribute to the residual risk, given current systems in place.

FSANZ said that the benefits through improved food safety outcomes would outweigh the costs of enforcing these measures. The impact of these new requirements is expected to be minimal, particularly if a two-year implementation period is provided.

Generally, there is a tendency for the numbers of contaminated birds to increase during transport from farm to processing plants, according to FSANZ.

Then, levels of Salmonella and Campylobacter on poultry carcasses generally fall during processing, although prevalence (i.e. proportion of contaminated birds) tends to increase, especially after evisceration. Chilling, under effective operation, usually results in a decrease in both numbers and prevalence.

Based on a model that predicted illness from Salmonella and Campylobacter, a ten-fold reduction in the level of contamination with the bacteria at the end of processing resulted in a 74 per cent and 93 per cent reduction in the number of predicted cases of illness respectively.

For both organisms there was a linear relationship between the prevalence at the end of processing and the final number of illness.

In other words, halving the prevalence could halve the estimated number of illnesses.