A food safety panel established by U.S. President Barack Obama outlined new rules Tuesday for food producers and for better co-ordination and communication among the agencies overseeing the U.S. food supply.

The new safety standards, aimed at reducing salmonella and E. coli outbreaks will be adopted by the Food and Drug Administration and the Agriculture Department.

People shop for vegetables at the farmers' market in Berkeley, Calif., in 2008. U.S. Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius unveiled a series of new regulations Tuesday designed to reducing food-borne illnesses from the U.S. food supply. (Eric Risberg/Associated Press)

Earlier this year a massive salmonella outbreak in peanut products sickened hundreds, was suspected of causing nine deaths, and led to one of the largest product recalls in U.S. history. In the past month, Nestle Toll House cookie dough and 170,000 kilograms of beef produced by the JBS Swift Beef Co. of Greeley, Colo., have been recalled due to connections with outbreaks of E. coli.

In March, Obama said he would create a special advisory group to co-ordinate antiquated food safety laws and recommend ways to update them. The more than 150,000 food processing plants and warehouses across the country fall under a variety of different rules and regulatory bodies.

That's set to change, as under the new rules:

• The FDA will help the food industry establish better tracing systems to track the origins of a bacterial outbreak.
• A new network will be established to help the many agencies that regulate food safety to communicate better.
• Egg and poultry producers will have to follow new standards designed to reduce salmonella contamination.
• The Food Safety Inspection Service, the Agriculture Department agency that inspects meat, will increase sampling of ground beef ingredients in an effort to better find E. coli contamination.
• The FDA will recommend ways that producers of leafy greens, melons and tomatoes can reduce disease strains, and require stricter standards in those industries within two years.

• An improved individual alert system to enhance the foodsafety.gov website.

• The FDA and the Agriculture Department also will create new positions to better oversee food safety. Among them, a Deputy Commissioner for Foods which will oversee the new rules.

The Agriculture Department inspects meat and poultry, and shares inspections of eggs with the FDA. The FDA inspects most other foods, but at least 15 government agencies are a part of the food safety system.

"A spirit of co-operation is essential to our nation's food safety," Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said at a press conference in Washington D.C. "These initiatives will prevent nearly 80,000 food-borne illnesses in the United States every year, and will reduce costs on the U.S. economy by close to $1 billion a year."

New rules aimed at reducing salmonella in eggs, for example, will be rolled out first. Producers will be mandated to only buy chicks and hens from suppliers that monitor for salmonella bacteria. Ninety per cent of egg-producing facilities in America will have to adhere to the new rules by 2010, Vice-President Joe Biden said, with the remainder doing so within three years.

"The food safety system in our country needs an update," he said. "In many ways, it's remained unchanged since 1906, when Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle."

"We have outdated laws and priorities across dozens of agencies, and our inspectors lack sufficient resources and that needs to change," he said. "Our goal is to overhaul the system."

With files from the Associated Press