Germany signals dramatic widening in food scare
Date: 07-Jun-02
Country: GERMANY
Author: Michael Hogan
Farm Minister Renate Kuenast told parliament that officials had now tracked down more than one source of the tainted feed, discovered it may also have been used for three years rather just six months, and had also been used on conventional farms.
Until now the scare had been confined to organic farms, where hundreds of thousands of chickens are being slaughtered after news tainted feed was delivered throughout Germany to more than 100 organic farms producing chickens, eggs and other poultry.
Kuenast said a grain store in Malchin in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern may have distributed the feed laced with the potentially carcinogenic herbicide nitrofen as early as 1999 to conventional producers.
This could hugely increase the volume of contaminated meat, already the subject of a frantic search by health officials.
Contaminated meat and eggs produced by the organic farms have probably already been eaten, a Farm Ministry spokesman in Lower Saxony state admitted last week.
Nitrofen is banned throughout the European Union, but German officials stress it is only a serious danger to health when consumed over long periods.
The EU, which has been hit by a rash of food scares such as mad cow disease, banned imports of shrimps and some other products from China in January after finding traces of banned antibiotic chloramphenicol, which can cause halt production of blood cells in humans.
HUNT FOR SECOND SOURCE
Kuenast told the lower house of Germany's parliament that tests showed some turkey meat traced could not have been tainted by feed from the Malchin warehouse, which in the days of communist East Germany was used to store pesticides and weedkiller.
A search was now under way for a second source, she said.
German organic poultry producers in Lower Saxony, the centre of the affair, sold meat from about 100,000 tainted birds to buyers in 10 German states and to Denmark, the Netherlands and Austria between November 2001 and May 2002.
Swiss authorities this week impounded about 400 tonnes of imported German feed wheat for precautionary tests. Suspect meat has also been exported to Austria, Denmark and the Netherlands.
Kuenast told parliament new regulations would be proposed to stop food producers secretly recalling contaminated products without informing authorities.