4), in a publication on the incidence and causes of foodborne illnesses in the United States, reported that a large number of outbreaks are caused by HNoV (58%). Additionally, relatively high hospitalization and death rates are associated with HAV infection (32% and 2%, respectively) (1, 4).According to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS), deli meat has posed the highest per annum risk of illness and death among poultry products (5). Additionally, in other studies, Gould et al. (6) and Painter et al. (7) studied surveillance and attribution of foodborne disease outbreaks in the United States from 1998 to 2008. They found that, among individual food categories, poultry was the most commonly reported food vehicle of disease, causing 17% of outbreaks of foodborne illness (6), and that the proportions of poultry-associated foodborne illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths caused by human noroviruses and HAV were 28%, 14%, and 4%, respectively (7). In 1998 through 2002 alone, three large outbreaks were linked to the consumption of turkey delicatessen meat contaminated during processing (7). Since ready-to-eat (RTE) meat and poultry deli products can be consumed without further cooking, these products should be free of non-spore-forming pathogens following the industrial thermal process. However, they can become contaminated before packaging in the final retail wrap and thus pose a safety threat for consumers (8,9). Viral contamination of RTE and prepared foods most frequently comes from poor hand-washing practices of food handlers after toilet use. Fecal material can be left on hands or even under nails which then can come in contact with food products (10). Handling cooked products with bare hands has been identified as a major factor for pathogen transfer to RTE foods (11), and there is presumed to be a direct correlation between the number of pathogenic organisms on a food employee's hands and the probability of microbial transfer from hands to cooked food products (12). Since the contamination most likely occurs at the surface, it seems advisable to decontaminate the outer layer of products. For this purpose, postpackage pasteurization technologies could be practiced as a method for reducing surface contamination by food pathogens (9). One of the challenges for the industry would be to assess the required time and temperature combination, which would depend on the thermal inactivation kinetics of the target microorganism (13). It has been reported that foodborne enteric viruses are more heat resistant than most non-spore-forming bacterial foodborne pathogens (14); thus, processing recommendations based on the data for non-spore-forming bacteria may not eliminate similar numbers of foodborne enteric viruses. Since there is no specific federal regulation covering the minimum time-temperature combinations for inactivating virus in contaminated deli meat, establishment of potential thermal processes for inactivating human norovirus...