06 September 2026
For years, the U.S. poultry industry and federal regulators have cited declining Salmonella contamination rates as evidence of improved food safety. Yet public health data paint a starkly different picture: rates of human foodborne illness have remained stubbornly stagnant. A landmark report published by Farm Forward (an American nonprofit organization founded in 2007 and dedicated exclusively to ending factory farming), titled “Salmonella Risk in the U.S. Poultry Industry: When Infections Become More Severe and Harder to Treat,” examines the factors underlying this discrepancy. By tracking federal data over more than a decade, the report demonstrates that the Salmonella strains persisting in the poultry supply chain have shifted toward some of the most clinically significant and drug-resistant serotypes.
Based on a longitudinal analysis of USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) surveillance data from 2014 to 2025, the investigation highlights several critical trends. The three serotypes most commonly associated with severe human illness, hospitalization, and death: Salmonella Infantis, S. Enteritidis, and S. Typhimurium, increased from accounting for just 25.3% of poultry isolates in 2014 to 67.9% in 2025. S. Infantis emerged as the single most prevalent serotype in the industry, increasing from 5.4% of samples in 2014 to 35.7% in 2025. By 2025, an alarming 97.8% of S. Infantis isolates were resistant to at least one medically important antibiotic, while 81.7% exhibited multidrug resistance (MDR). Nearly all S. Infantis isolates (98%) showed decreased susceptibility to ciprofloxacin, a critically important antibiotic used in human medicine. In 2025, 73.3% of all Salmonella-positive poultry samples were resistant to one or more antibiotics classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as critically or highly important to human medicine, up from 48.1% in 2014. Multidrug resistance, defined as resistance to three or more antibiotic classes, more than doubled, increasing from 15.9% to 32.4%.
The risk is heavily concentrated in specific slaughter and processing establishments, including facilities operated by major industry players that consistently rank among those with the highest levels of contamination, virulent serotypes, and multidrug resistance.
The report criticizes the USDA’s current oversight mechanism, which evaluates slaughterhouses based primarily on binary “positive/negative” test results without accounting for serotype virulence or antimicrobial resistance. Furthermore, the USDA’s decision in April 2025 to withdraw a proposed rule that would have classified Salmonella as an adulterant has left regulators without the legal authority to mandate recalls or halt sales from chronically contaminated plants.
Gillespie, K. (2026). Salmonella Risk in the U.S. Poultry Industry: When Infections Become More Severe and Harder to Treat. Farm Forward Issue Brief.
