If you produce a safe product at one point in the food chain but contaminate it at another point, then all gains are lost. Establish a microbiological testing program based on good science. If bacteria are the culprit, then we need to find and control them. National microbiological marketplace baseline data on raw and cooked food products should be collected to evaluate the effectiveness of the industry as a whole and to evaluate individual plant performance. In the raw meat and poultry industry, there are only a handful of technologies that destroy bacteria.
Cooking is undoubtedly the best defense.
In slaughter plants, antibacterial rinses help improve the safety profile of carcasses. Irradiation is another proven technology used in more than 20 other countries, but shunned in the United States. Both the food police and industry should be chided for not encouraging and adopting the use of irradiation for food safety. Good science, combined with common sense, should drive food safety reform. The debate is how to get from here to there.