2016-2020 Action Plan: National Program 108 - Food Safety

The 2016-2020 Action Plan: National Program 108 - Food Safety is a national sectoral action plan of the United States of America. Its main objective is to provide the means to ensure that the food supply is safe for consumers and that food and feed meet foreign and domestic regulatory requirements.
The Action Plan is focused on the most critical issues and needs which are described as Problem Statements (1-7) under one Component, Foodborne Contaminants. More specifically, the Action Plan aims to identify and characterize the movement, structure, and dynamics of microbial populations within food-animal and plant systems, across the entire food continuum, from production through processing; to utilize omic-technologies and apply them to the study of foodborne pathogens in complex food systems; provide technologies for detection and characterization; to reduce risks arising from contamination of food by chemical and biological contaminants; reduce or eliminate pathogens in food animals and their derived products, seafood, and plant crops during production and processing; predict the behavior of pathogens under stressed conditions (more relevant to the food industry) where growth/inactivation is stochastic; and detect, measure, and assess the amount of AMR bacteria within the production animal populations with an emphasis on foodborne pathogens.
Among others, the Action Plan also provides for developing alternative strategies to minimize the use of antibiotics in production animals while maintaining and improving animal health and ensuring safe food for consumers is a critical need; development of alternative strategies to reduce the level of antibiotic use as well as developing mitigation strategies for foodborne AMR bacteria in food producing animals; multidisciplinary approaches to understand the development, persistence, and transmission of resistant genes, and antimicrobial resistant in foodborne microorganisms; improved detection methods to assess bacteria for antibiotic resistance genetic elements in foodborne pathogens; methods to assist other Federal agencies in measuring and assessing AMR in food animal populations, e.g., assisting FSIS in interpreting National Antimicrobial Resistance Monitoring System (NARMS) results and provide support for USDA’s National Animal Health Monitoring System (NAHMS) studies on AMR bacteria; alternatives to antibiotics including management practices, pre-and probiotics, bacteriophage gene products, lytic enzymes, vaccines and other novel products to reduce their levels in food producing animals, thus reducing the need for antibiotics. The development of any practice/product must ensure practicality and potential utilization so that implementation is cost effective to the producer, readily approved by regulatory agencies and industry, and easily incorporated into any management system; and elucidating the ecology of foodborne AMR bacteria in terms of gene transfer, the role of the host microbiome in the development and maintenance of AMR, and the role of biofilms in the development of AMR.