A non-profit physician’s group is asking a federal court to immediately order meat and poultry processing plants to test their products for COVID-19, and make the results of their tests public.

Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), a group that advocates for reducing reliance on animals for scientific research and for preventive medicine, as well as monitors federal food policy, asked for the mandate in a lawsuit filed Wednesday against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The filing comes as Chinese authorities report that routine sample inspections of imported chicken wings from Brazil showed contamination with COVID-19, as did packaging on shrimp from Ecuador.

In its complaint, PCRM said the USDA wrongly rejected a petition that it filed in May asking to implement new meat and poultry testing requirements for COVID-19, as well as labeling to warn consumers that meat could carry the virus. The organization also claims the agency failed to respond to its requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

“The agency didn't test a thing and it doesn't doesn't seem to care,” Mark Kennedy, attorney for PCRM, told Yahoo Finance. This is the agency that's in charge of protecting this part of the food chain and they just said no.”

According to PCRM, USDA rejected its petition on the basis that it failed to reference studies or show supporting information backing up its claim that coronavirus can be transmitted by meat and poultry products, or other food.

However, the physician’s group alleges that meat and poultry processing plants have already proven central points of viral spread in humans, including in South Dakota where more than half of the state’s coronavirus cases have allegedly occurred in workers at Chinese-owned Smithfield’s processing plant in Sioux Falls. As well as at a Perdue Farms processing plant in Maryland, where it said 5% of 663 workers tested positive for COVID-19.

“In just over half a year, at least 40,517 meatpacking workers have tested positive for COVID-19, and at least 189 have died of COVID-19,” the complaint states.

“We have no numbers for what’s landing on the meat because we're not testing at all,” Kennedy said. “It wouldn’t be too hard to just check.”

Processing plants are vulnerable to disease spread, the physicians say, because processing volume is high and droplets from talking, sneezing and coughing can remain airborne where plant workers and inspectors come into close proximity each day with thousands of animal carcasses.

“Meat processing plants typically slaughter more than 300 cattle per hour and more than 1,000 pigs every hour,” the lawsuit states. “Poultry processing plants collectively slaughter more than 20 million birds every day, typically on high-speed automated production lines that process as many as 175 birds per minute.”