8 July 2008

Swine disease no problem for pork rind imports

This article is extracted from the 8 July 2008 edition of “American Shipper”.

Imports of pork rinds, a snack food made from deep-fried pork skins, are so well cooked that the risk of transmitting hog diseases, such as foot-and-mouth disease, swine vesicular disease, African swine fever and classical swine fever, is non-existent, said the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

To be eligible for importation into the United States, APHIS requires all pork products from regions where these diseases are known to exist to be cooked or cured in a way that the pathogens are inactivated. After preparing a risk assessment, APHIS has concluded that the pork skin cooking methods examined “exceed these requirements.”…