[jkh1]

Chlorine treatment can make bacteria undetectable by inducing a dormant state [1] so some earlier studies on effectiveness of chemical treatments may not be valid.

Also the US and EU have different approaches to meat production. In the EU, the principle is to prevent meat contamination in the first place throughout the food production chain whereas in the US emphasis is placed on decontamination at the end of the chain.

Finally, some recent bacterial food poisoning outbreaks in Europe were due to vegetables so comparing numbers of infections without taking the source into consideration can be misleading.

1- https://mbio.asm.org/content/9/2/e00540-18.full

[mzs]

They are proposing the use of peracetic acid instead of chlorine.

[jkh1]

This may also induce a kind of dormant state in bacteria as many chemical stresses do. So whether a new chemical treatment is more effective needs to be tested in light of this knowledge. While peracetic acid has known disinfectant properties, it's only been used for washing hands as far as I know, not for ingestion. It's also a very strong irritant even at low concentration, plus it usually contains a mixture of acetic acid, hydrogen peroxide and sulfuric acid in various proportions. I am not sure how this would be controlled and there's been no study on ingestion of this combination of substances in humans.