The FDA issued a warning letter on August 14, 2012 to Centrum Valley Farms following an inspection April 30 through May 4, 2012 after it “found that your facility had serious violations of the Prevention of Salmonella Enteritidis (SE) in Shell Eggs During Production, Storage, and Transportation regulation (the shell egg regulation), Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations, Part 118 (21 CFR 118).” Some of the violations were as follows:
- does not include testing of the pullet environment when pullets are 14 to 16 weeks of age
- does not include procedures for removing dust, feathers and old feed from a pullet house for which an environmental test was positive
- does not include procedures for disinfecting the positive pullet house
The FDA also noted concern:
about the presence of Salmonella Heidelberg (SH) in your poultry house environment. During the investigation of the 2010 nationwide SE outbreak where an estimated 2,000 people contracted SE, SH was also found on farms which you now operate. SH is an organism that can transmit via the transovarian route, in a fashion similar to SE. There is a strong body of scientific evidence indicating the primary risk factor for SH illness is shell eggs. Furthermore, SH has caused several egg associated outbreaks resulting in human illness and at times death. Given this body of evidence, FDA considers SH within a poultry house environment to be a public health threat. During the recent investigation, SH was identified in two of the six houses we sampled at the South site.
The Egg Rule at work.