European commission says scandal a case of food fraud after publishing results of EU-wide testing for horsemeat and bute
Europe's horsemeat scandal is "a matter of food fraud and not food safety", the European commission said after publishing the results of random tests which revealed that less than 5% of tested beef contained equine DNA. The unprecedented testing exercise costing €2.5m (£2.13m) was ordered in February across 27 EU member states after consumer scares about horsemeat in processed meat and ready meals including traces found in a batch of Findus frozen lasagne. Inspectors who carried out 4,144 DNA checks and 3,115 for the banned horse drug known as bute – phenylbutazone – reported that only 193 samples contained positive traces of horsemeat, while 19 – some 0.5% – were contaminated with bute.
The UK got a clean bill of health, as did Ireland, where the meat contamination crisis was first identified in January. In the UK, 150 samples of pre-packed beef products and 34 that were not pre-packed were submitted for the survey by the Food Standards Agency, but none were found to contain horse DNA at or above the 1% threshold for reporting. The batch of tests show that Ireland 47 pre-packed and three non pre-packed samples of beef showed no signs of horsemeat.
The worst offender was France, which had more cases of horsemeat in beef products than any other EU country – more than one in every eight samples testing positive (353 samples of which 47 had horsemeat traces). In Greece, 36 out of 288 samples contained some horsemeat, compared with 29 out 878 processed beef samples in Germany. And Italy had 27 positive test results of 361 beef products.
Only last week the Netherlands recalled 50,000 tonnes of meat sold across Europe as beef over a two-year period which may contain horsemeat. A small number of UK businesses may have received products from a trading company selling the meat.
Member states were also asked to provide information on bute testing being carried out at slaughterhouses. During the relevant period (11 February to 4 April 2013) 836 carcasses were tested for bute in the UK, of which 14 were positive and were prevented from entering the food chain. Phenylbutazone is an anti-inflammatory drug used as a painkiller in veterinary medicine for pets and horses that have been explicitly excluded from the food chain.
Tonio Borg, the EC commissioner for health and consumers, said: "Today's findings have confirmed that this is a matter of food fraud and not of food safety. Restoring the trust and confidence of European consumers and trading partners in our food chain following this fraudulent labelling scandal is now of vital importance for the European economy given that the food sector is the largest single economic sector in the EU."
The commission sought to reassure consumers by referring to a joint statement from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) this month which concluded that the risks associated to bute were of "low concern for consumers due to the low likelihood of exposure and the overall low likelihood of toxic effects and that, on a given day, the probability of a consumer being both susceptible to developing aplastic anaemia and being exposed to phenylbutazone was estimated to range approximately from 2 in a trillion to 1 in 100 million."
European commission officials and experts from the different states will meet on Friday to discuss proposals to strengthen official supply controls as well as introducing fines on food fraudsters.
And on Wednesday the board of the FSA will decide whether to launch a review into its own response to the food scare, which would be parallel to a wide-ranging government inquiry announced earlier this week.
Amid an ongoing slump in consumer confidence in beef products, Joanna Swabe, EU director of humane society international, warned that the EC tests were incomplete and putting public health at risk: "Testing for just one of the many drugs banned for use in animals that enter the food chain falls short of a precautionary and thorough approach to addressing fraud and ensuring food safety standards are met. It isn't just phenylbutazone in horsemeat that poses a potential risk to human health. The European commission has failed to seek tests for a whole host of other banned veterinary drugs, which are commonly administered to horses, and is thereby failing the public by allowing meat from these animals to be sold in the European Union in contravention of its own food safety and consumer protection regulations."
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