It's a very good question. There are a number of government entities as well as the private sector that are involved in protecting the public and assuring that food-borne illnesses are minimized.
The primary responsibility for the safety of the food, meat, and poultry products rests with the Department of Agriculture and the Food Safety and Inspection Service. In many cases, as was explained by the earlier panel, illness outbreaks are detected by the public health community--the local, the state. They do the primary work of detecting outbreaks, and most of that is reported to our Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. It is through the public health communities that the USDA is alerted to meat and poultry.
For your clarification, other food products in the United States are regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration--products other than meat, poultry, and some portions of fish and egg products. Once the regulatory agencies that are responsible for the safety of the food are informed of a potential outbreak, they will work hand in hand with the public health community to determine the products that may be involved and try to take as immediate action as possible to recall and remove that product from the marketplace in order to minimize potential exposure.
So there are really three primary focuses--the industry, the Department of Agriculture on the food side, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the local health officials on the human health illness side.