Testing of ground beef purchased in retail stores was negative for bird flu so far, the US Department of Agriculture announced on Wednesday, after studying meat samples collected from states whose herds were infected by this year’s unprecedented outbreak of the virus in cattle.
The results “reaffirm that the meat supply is safe,” the department said in a statement released Wednesday evening after testing was completed.
Health officials cited the “rigorous meat inspection process” overseen by the department’s Food Safety Inspection Service, or FSIS, when asked whether this year’s outbreak in dairy cattle could also threaten meat eaters.
“FSIS inspects each animal before slaughter, and all cattle carcasses must pass post-slaughter inspection and be determined to be suitable for entry into the human food supply,” the department said.
The National Veterinary Services Laboratories analyzed a total of 30 ground beef samples purchased from retail outlets in states where dairy cattle herds had tested positive.
To date, dairy cattle in at least nine states (Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Michigan, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota and Texas) have tested positive for H5N1, which is often fatal for poultry and other animals. like catsbut largely spared the livestock, apart from sometimes disrupting their milk production for a few weeks.
Other results from the department regarding avian flu in beef are expected soon. Samples taken from beef muscle from dairy cows condemned by slaughterhouse inspectors are still being tested for the virus. The department is also testing how cooking beef patties at different temperatures will kill the virus.
“I want to emphasize that we are almost sure that the meat supply is safe. We are doing this just to improve our scientific knowledge, to make sure that we have additional data to make this statement,” said Dr. José Emilio Esteban. The USDA’s undersecretary for food safety told reporters Wednesday.
Studies come after USDA rise in power testing requirements on dairy cattle crossing state lines last month in response to the outbreak.
Officials said that was partly because they detected a mutated version of H5N1 in the lung tissue of an asymptomatic cow sent to the slaughterhouse. While FSIS blocked the cow from entering the food supply, officials suggested the “isolated” incident raised questions about how the virus was spreading.
Signs of bird flu have also made their way into the retail dairy supply, with as many as one in five milk samples testing positive in a national Food and Drug Administration survey.
The FDA attributed them to harmless fragments of the virus left after pasteurization, pointing to experiences showing that there was no live infectious virus in the samples of products like milk and sour cream that initially tested positive.
But the finding worried health authorities and experts because cows could go unnoticed without symptoms, given that farms are supposed to throw away milk from sick cows.
A herd that tested positive in North Carolina remains asymptomatic and is still actively producing milk, a spokesperson for the state’s Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services told CBS News.
It’s still unclear exactly how H5N1 got into milk. Don Prater, the FDA’s top food safety official, said Wednesday that milk processors “may receive milk from hundreds of different farms, which may cross state lines,” complicating efforts to trace the virus.
“It would require extensive testing to trace back that far,” Bailee Woolstenhulme, a spokeswoman for the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, told CBS News.
Woolstenhulme said health authorities are only able to easily trace milk back to the so-called “bulk tanks” that bottlers obtain.
“These milk tanks contain milk from multiple dairies, so we will need to test cows from all the dairies whose milk was in the milk tank,” Woolstenhulme said.
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