21.10.2017

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has published the last set of results from its third survey of campylobacter contamination in fresh shop-bought UK-produced chickens.
The full year’s results show that on average, across the entire market, 6.5% of chickens tested positive for the highest level of contamination, (over 1,000 colony forming units per gram – cfu/g). This is down from 19.7% in 2014/15 when the survey began.
This is the full year’s results from our third annual retail survey - August 2016 to July 2017 – based on a total of 3,980 whole fresh chickens sampled at retail.
Full results from the survey found:
The figure for high-level campylobacter prevalence (more than 1,000 cfu/g) among the top nine retailers (based on market share) was 5.6%. The ‘Others’ group, consisting of smaller retailers and butchers, had a significantly higher prevalence at 17.1% compared to the top nine retailers. The retailers with significantly lower prevalence than the average among all retailers were Morrisons (2.9%), Tesco (4.2%) and Waitrose (2.7%). There was a significant fall in the percentage of chickens positive for campylobacter at any level down from 73.2% in 2014/15 to 54% in 2016/17. In the last period of the third annual survey, April – July 2017, based on a total of 1,437 chicken samples 5.9% of chickens had high levels of campylobacter (over 1,000 cfu/g) down from 20.1% for the same period in 2014.