Is it necessary to swab for listeria following machine repair?

Hi Everyone, 

We recently just did some repair work on one of our small ribbon blenders. We took the machine completely apart, added some parts and reassembled. 

We completely WRS the entire piece of equipment. 

The Ribbon blender is used to make RTE Chicken Salads. Should I swab the machine for Listeria before releasing it back into production?

And if so, obviously the machine would have to be on hold until the results came back. 

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!

If both your maintenance personnel and sanitation personnel followed proper protocols when working on/cleaning said piece of equipment, it seems highly impractical to do so, especially if you are sending the swabs to an outside lab.  Also, since a swab or two are really only a small sampling of the entire piece Ribbon blender, I don't see that you are really providing yourself with any great additional confidence that the machine is actually "listeria free" ...

But if you have plenty of time to spare, go ahead.  My feeling is that, at some point you should reach the level of confidence with the programs that you've put in place to where you don't have to swab everything that a non-production-worker touches.

I'd think that if you've validated that you're company's cleaning and sanitation is effective you should be able to use those procedures/SSOPs to clean and sanitize product contact surfaces of the blender.