Contacts:
Sarah Sue Goldsmith
LSU News Service, 504-388-3871
Elizabeth Coleman
Louisiana Sea Grant College Program, 504-388-6449
Vice President Al Gore's office will present an award on Tuesday, Sept. 22, to the Louisiana Sea Grant Program at LSU and other members of the national Sea Grant Alliance for promoting the safety of U.S. seafood.
The Gore Hammer Award, given to partnerships that make a contribution to the nation, will be presented to alliance partners in Gatlinburg, Tenn., by Linda Walker, director of the vice president's National Performance Evaluations Project.
The Sea Grant Alliance trains seafood processors nationwide to meet safety standards set by the FDA. Processors learn to use Hazard Analysis of Critical Control Points (HACCP), a seafood-safety monitoring program that all companies that pack, process or hold seafood for shipment must implement by December 18, 1997.
Through Alliance-sponsored workshops, Dr. Mike Moody, Sea Grant seafood technology specialist in the LSU Ag Center's Louisiana Cooperative Extension Service, has trained nearly 600 Louisiana processors of more than 24 species of commercial fish -- as well as crabs, shrimp, crawfish and oysters -- to understand the HACCP concept and develop monitoring plans for their plants. Nationwide, nearly 300 commercial species of fish and fishery products are produced by more than 5,000 product processors. Moody helped create the Alliance and developed the program for teaching Alliance trainers how to train seafood processors.
The HACCP system helps plant operators to identify potential contamination sites in the seafood production process so that they can take preventive action. It differs from the traditional method of inspecting products after they have gone through the processing stage.
Hazards are defined as any biological, chemical or physical conditions in a plant that make food unsafe for consumption. Hazards may involve temperatures of processing and length of processing time or may be as simple as teaching a crab processor that bacteria can invade cooked crab meat that has been separated from the back and refrigerated overnight before packaging. Storing the crabs overnight and removing the backs immediately before packaging eliminates the greatest danger of bacterial contamination.
Moody's three-day workshops discuss the concepts and regulations of HACCP, hazards that might be encountered, developing production plans and effective record keeping. Much of this information is put on computers at the plants. The presentation is tailored to the species of fish or shellfish processed by the plant.
The FDA estimates that the new HACCP regulations will prevent 20,000 to 60,000 seafood poisonings a year, saving consumers up to $115 million annually.
Cameron Parish shrimp processor Paul Day of Alpha Seafood, who attended one of Moody's HACCP workshops, said, "I'd been to educational seminars on safety before, but HACCP was completely different. It has a new approach and new information. It was interesting and informative, and I recommend it highly."
Day, who has been in seafood processing for 16 years, said that HACCP will make his plant operations more efficient. "We'll be able to prevent potential contamination problems instead of suddenly finding ourselves in a doomsday situation where so many problems have built up that we have to stop everything to take care of them."
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