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Germany lifts quarantine on 3,000 farms in contaminated egg scandal

11 January 2011 03:21 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Lower Saxony, the state hardest hit by Germany’s tainted egg scandal, has lifted a quarantine on 3,000 poultry and hog farms after tests proved negative for increased dioxin levels, officials said Monday, APA reports quoting cnn.com website.
The state may lift the quarantine on more farms once additional test results come in Monday, said the state’s ministry for consumer protection and agriculture.
Also Monday, Germany’s minister for agriculture and consumer affairs, Ilse Aigner, published an initiative for animal feed safety in reaction to the scandal. The initiative calls for consideration of harsher punishments for violations of the law. The list was published after a crisis meeting between Aigner and representatives of the country’s animal feed industry.
"Today, events like the discovery of dioxin animal are not merely local in nature anymore. They have regional and possibly even global effects in concerning public health and economic damage," the initiative says. "The federal ministries for consumer protection and justice together will explore the need to adjust current laws."
The initiative also calls for stricter registration rules and a strict separation of ingredients for animal feeds and those for other industrial processes.
Meanwhile, Danish investigators said Monday they are looking into the possibility that contaminated animal feed from Germany may have been given to hens in Denmark.
The feed, contaminated with dioxin, was purchased by a Danish firm late last year, said Kim Vandrup Sigsgaard with the Danish Veterinary and Food Administration.
"There is an ongoing investigation to see if the contaminated feed was consumed by breeder hens, which are not meant for consumption," he said.
Such hens are bred for their eggs, and not sold for their meat, he said.
Sigsgaard said his agency was warned about the feed entering Denmark by the European Union’s food safety system, the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed, on Sunday.
Last week, Germany filed criminal charges against the company at the heart of the country’s tainted egg scandal.
The company, Harles and Jentzsch, apparently knew for months that fatty acid it was delivering to animal-feed makers was contaminated with dioxin, said Christian Seifert, a spokesman for the agricultural ministry in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.
Criminal charges have been filed against the company, Seifert said, "because they did not immediately inform" the agricultural ministry that dioxin levels surpassed the allowed amount.
Authorities allege that the company sold about 3,000 tons of contaminated fatty acids to dozens of companies making animal feed across Germany. In response, the government quarantined more than 4,700 pig and poultry farms.
Harles and Jentzsch laboratory tests from March 2010 showed they exceeded the ceiling level for dioxin, he said.
"At that point they had to stop delivering this product and immediately inform the authorities. They did not do either," Seifert said.
Government officials learned of the higher concentrations of dioxin in December, he said.
Several attempts to reach Harles and Jentzsch last week for comment were unsuccessful.
Dioxin levels in the final feed product were diluted and it is likely they did not exceed allowed amounts, Seifert said.
"Of course that is no excuse. The conduct is still wrong," he said.
The farms shut down include not only ones raising chickens and other poultry, but also pig farms, said Pierre Vetter, a spokesman for Germany’s Ministry for Agriculture and Consumer Protection.
State authorities quarantined all farms that received animal feed from companies affected, regardless of whether there is proof that the feed was contaminated, the ministry’s website said.
"The state authorities are right to quarantine products -- eggs and meat -- that may have been exposed to contaminated feed, even if there is no concrete scientific evidence in all cases," Aigner said in a statement.
About 130,000 possibly contaminated eggs were exported from a company in Germany to a food company in Netherlands, where they were to be used in industrial food production, said Holger Eichele, a spokesman for Germany’s Ministry for Agriculture and Consumer Protection.
The UK Food Standards Agency said a pasteurized mixture including some of the contaminated eggs was distributed in Britain.
"The mixing of the eggs will have diluted the levels of dioxins and they are not thought to be a risk to health," the agency said in a statement.
Dioxins are a family of toxic chemicals that share a similar chemical structure and have been characterized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as likely human carcinogens.