Farms shut as cancer poisons are now found in chickens

By ALLAN HALL IN BERLIN

Who's chicken? Around 5,000 farms were shut across Germany and thousands of chickens culled after feed from a chemical company near Hamburg was tainted


Germany's poisoned eggs scare has spread to chickens after investigators reported raised levels of cancer-causing dioxin in meat.

Three chickens out of 15 samples of chicken, turkey and pork sent to the European Commission showed a dioxin concentration twice as high as legal levels.

Eating the meat ‘would not have been harmful in the short term since the contamination levels were so low,’ an agriculture ministry spokesman in Germany said yesterday.

The tested chickens had not been sold in shops, but it is possible that other infected meat has entered the food chain in Germany.

However, it is not thought that any infected poultry from Germany has been sold in Britain.

The meat scare follows last week’s admission that tainted eggs from chickens which ate feed contaminated with dioxin entered the UK food chain.

Around 5,000 farms were shut across Germany and thousands of chickens culled after feed from a chemical company near Hamburg was tainted.


Thorough egg-samination: A German scientist conducts tests after thousands of tainted eggs entered the UK food chain last week


The feed from the Harles & Jentzsch firm went to 25 distributors in Germany and from there to thousands of farms.

Liquid egg processed from 130,000 suspect eggs moved from Holland into British supermarkets in products such as mayonnaise and pastries.

The agriculture ministry in Schleswig-Holstein, which monitors Harles & Jentzsch, said it had proof the company had been producing tainted food for nine months. Some feed had 77 per cent more dioxin than EU safe levels.

German prosecutors will attempt to determine this week how many infected eggs reached the food chain in Britain from poisoned feed.

With one in five consumers in Germany avoiding all eggs, EU food safety chiefs want to know how many millions have been sold since the problem was first identified in March last year.
The European Commission has said there were no grounds for a ban on exports of German meat or other products.

There were calls in Germany yesterday for tough legal action against those responsible for contaminating food with dioxin.

Agriculture minister Ilse Aigner called the conduct that led to excessive levels of the highly toxic chemical entering animal feed a ‘criminal act’, adding that German farmers had been ‘innocently dragged into this situation by the sick machinations of a few people’.

Around 3,000 of the closed farms were reopened yesterday.


source: dailymail