The President’s Food Safety Working Group will announce today at 1:30 Eastern Time that the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department will adopt new standards targeted at combating foodborne illnesses in the United States. According to a pre-release, under the new rules:

• The FDA will help the food industry establish better tracing systems to track the origins of a bacterial outbreak.
• A new network will be established to help the many agencies that regulate food safety to communicate better.
• Egg and poultry producers will have to follow new standards designed to reduce salmonella contamination.
• The Food Safety Inspection Service, the Agriculture Department agency that inspects meat, will increase sampling of ground beef ingredients in an effort to better find E. coli contamination.
• The FDA will recommend ways that producers of leafy greens, melons and tomatoes can reduce disease strains, and require stricter standards in those industries within two years.
• The FDA and the Agriculture Department also will create new positions to better oversee food safety.

It will be interesting to see and hear the presentation. The group certainly has bitten off quite a large food safety meal.