Keeping tabs
Agriculture Department food safety inspectors are now equipped with laptop computers that help them access research data and communicate vital outbreak information more quickly
Agriculture Department food safety inspectors are now equipped with laptop
computers that help them access research data and communicate vital outbreak
information more quickly to each other and, ultimately, the public.
With the computers, this mobile workforce has a far easier job inspecting
155 million carcasses of meat each year, 8.4 billion carcasses of poultry
and 3.4 billion pounds of egg products, powdered eggs and the egg ingredients
used in such products as cake mixes.
The new equipment includes 900 Dell Computer Corp. desktop computers
permanently housed at food processing plants that are inspected daily, such
as those run by Perdue Farms Inc., and 3,300 Gateway Inc. Solo notebook
PCs for inspectors to carry from site to site. Each notebook has an XGA
color screen, a 333 MHz Pentium II processor, 128M of RAM, a 6.4G hard drive
and a 56 kilobits/sec modem.
NEXT STORY: DOD procurement chief: Just deliver