The U.S. poultry industry and federal regulators have, for years, pointed to decreasing salmonella contamination as evidence that efforts to control salmonella are progressing. Yet USDA reports that there has been no corresponding reduction in human illness. Although USDA emphasizes reductions in the overall level of salmonella in poultry products, its public messaging gives little attention to the specific salmonella strains that persist in the food supply—strains that increasingly include some of the most dangerous-to-humans and difficult-to-treat pathogens.
While Farm Forward’s first report on salmonella analyzed overall contamination rates in the poultry industry, and exposed the most contaminated slaughter and processing plants and the inability of the federal government to regulate salmonella contamination, our latest investigation focuses on the changes in salmonella strains in the poultry industry from 2014 to 2025 and the danger they represent. Using USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) surveillance data from poultry slaughter and processing plants, this report goes beyond basic contamination metrics to evaluate the factors that most directly influence human health risk: which salmonella serotypes (strains) are circulating in the industry, how likely they are to cause severe disease, and how difficult infections may be to treat.
The findings reveal a worsening risk profile for public health. In our new analysis of FSIS salmonella serotype and antibiotic resistance testing data, we found that, over the last decade, contamination with high-virulence and multidrug-resistant strains linked to invasive infection, hospitalization, and death has risen sharply and shows no indication of slowing or reversing. In other words, while the percentage of positive salmonella tests is lower overall, a growing share of the salmonella that exists is among the most dangerous to human health.
This shift reflects not only changes in the prevalence of individual serotypes, but also the broader conditions under which poultry is produced and processed. Features of intensive poultry production—including high-density housing, rapid processing speeds, genetic uniformity that weakens birds’ immune resilience, and repeated opportunities for transmission across the production system—can create conditions that favor the persistence and spread of certain high-risk serotypes. Since these serotypes rarely make the animals sick, they are the ones that are amplified and dominate over time.
Our analysis found that these risks are not evenly distributed across the industry. Certain slaughter and processing plants owned by major poultry companies repeatedly emerge as centers of persistent contamination by highly virulent, antibiotic-resistant strains. This concentration challenges the argument that dangerous salmonella contamination is an unavoidable consequence of poultry production. Instead, it suggests that facility-level practices, supply-chain conditions, and regulatory oversight play an important role in determining whether high-risk pathogens persist and spread. As a result, responsibility for controlling salmonella risk cannot be placed primarily on consumers through food handling and cooking practices at home.
The persistence of these contamination hotspots also raises questions about accountability. Some companies continued to operate facilities where dangerous salmonella strains recur year after year despite ongoing monitoring, while regulatory responses have done little to eliminate the risks posed by their infrastructure and practices. The result is a food-safety system that tolerates conditions reliably generating a measurable level of ongoing exposure to highly virulent and antibiotic-resistant strains. Our findings show how these risks have evolved over time and where they are most concentrated.
Key Findings
Our findings reveal that the industry’s problem is no longer just generic salmonella contamination. Increasingly, the strains dominating poultry production are among the most severe human pathogens and among the most difficult to treat when infection occurs. The persistence and continued growth of these strains suggest that the industry’s salmonella problem is becoming more dangerous, not less.
These dynamics point to a broader system in which production conditions, not only individual plant performance, determine the persistence and evolution of high-risk pathogens.
The consequences extend far beyond individual cases of food poisoning. Every year that multidrug-resistant salmonella circulates through poultry production systems, the industry erodes the effectiveness of antibiotics that remain critical for human medicine. The continued spread of these strains increases the risk not only of illness, hospitalization, and death from salmonella, but also of salmonella’s resistance spreading more broadly to other bacterial pathogens. The stakes of antibiotic resistance cannot be overstated: As bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, treatment options narrow, leading rapidly to what the World Health Organization (WHO) has characterized as a post-antibiotic era, where many common injuries and illnesses that have been easily treated since the advent of antibiotics—a scraped knee, strep throat, a urinary tract infection, an ear infection—again become potentially life-threatening.
To assess the compounding risk emerging from the poultry industry, this report examines trends in high-virulence, antibiotic-resistant serotypes in poultry production, how the industry and current regulatory systems have failed to contain these dangerous pathogens, and which companies and facilities are driving some of the highest-risk contamination patterns.