Pig feed dioxin crisis linked to oil at Irish food recycling company

The company has been named as Millstream Power Recycling, of Fenagh, County Carlow. Officials are testing oil put in a machine that was used to dry animal feed.

A spokesman for the small feed company said: “Millstream will be carrying out a full investigation to establish how the company's strict health and safety procedures and the high quality standards could possibly have been breached.”

Doubts were first raised last Monday when routine testing of pigs indicated the presence of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) - banned in the Irish Republic since the 1970s - in animal feed.

In some cases contamination levels were around 200 times the legal limit. Production was halted once the problem was identified.

The Northern Ireland pig industry was drawn into the crisis yesterday (Sunday, December 7), as it emerged that some farms in the province may have used contaminated feed.

Nine farms there had been supplied with the feed being linked to the contamination in addition to 47 in the Irish Republic.

Supermarkets across the UK have been withdrawing pork from their shelves produced in the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland since September, in accordance with official advice.

The UK imports around 15,000 tonnes of pigmeat from Ireland, which amounts to 6 per cent of total pigmeat imports and around 3 per cent of all pigmeat consumed.

Despite the mass recall of products, the food safety authorities in Britain and Ireland are reassuring consumers that the public health risks are low.

The Food Standards Agency said it was ‘advising consumers not to eat pork or pork products, such as sausages, bacon, salami and ham, which are labelled as being from the Irish Republic or Northern Ireland, while it continues to investigate whether any products contaminated with dioxins have been distributed in the UK’.

Chronic long-term exposure to dioxins can have serious health effects, including causing cancers.

But the FSA stressed: “From the information that we have at this time, we do not believe there is significant risk to UK consumers as adverse health effects from eating the affected products are only likely if people are exposed to relatively high levels of this contaminant for long periods.”

Have your say

Please do not complete the following form field for security reasons.

Name

E-mail

Comment