USDA issues letter of no objection for Neogen’s NeoSEEK STEC detection system
Neogen Corp. has announced the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) has issued a letter of no objection for the use of Neogen’s NeoSEEK pathogen DNA detection method to detect Shiga toxin-producing strains of E. coli (STECs). The letter of no objection allows the use of the 24-hour NeoSEEK STEC system as a confirmatory method for six STEC serogroups (O26, O45, O103, O111, O121, and O145) and states the NeoSEEK system is comparable to the reference method, FSIS MLG 5B.02, which can take three or more days to achieve a confirmatory result. This allows companies to use the NeoSEEK system to comply with the USDA’s recently implemented regulation that requires the testing of raw beef trim for six new STEC serogroups, in addition to the previously regulated STEC, E. coli O157:H7.
“The letter from the USDA provides further assurance to our customers that our NeoSEEK system performs as designed,” said James Herbert, Neogen’s chairman and CEO. “As worldwide food regulation has evolved to address newly identified threats to our global food supply, such as STECs, Neogen’s test systems have evolved to rapidly and accurately detect those threats. NeoSEEK provides the DNA-definitive test the food industry needs that has been proven to be comparable to the older reference method, yet provides much quicker results.”