- Farmers facing fines for flouting virus measures Hundreds
of tons of cheap meat at risk of "mad cow" disease was used to
make baby food during the 1980s when the BSE epidemic was at its height.
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- One manufacturer of baby food has admitted using large
amounts of mechanically recovered meat (MRM), stripped from cattle carcasses
using high-pressure water hoses, at a time when millions of animals were
infected with BSE.
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- The name of the baby food company has never been divulged,
even though it has been known to the food industry since 1997 when a confidential
survey took place of the meat-processing firms that used MRM during the
1980s.
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- But an industry trade body involved in the survey yesterday
was unable to make public the companies that have used low-grade beef in
baby food, a day after it promised to co-operate with an inquiry into the
use of cheap meat infected with BSE.
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- An investigation by The Independent has found that the
British Meat Manufacturers Association had secretly drawn up a list of
its members who used MRM during the 1980s.
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- The list includes at least one company that regularly
included MRM in its baby food products. However, the association was unable
yesterday to name this or any other company that included MRM in pies,
burgers, sausages and other products in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A spokesman for the British Meat Manufacturers Association said last night:
"The simple truth is we can't find the data. We've turned the place
upside down but the information has been lost."
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- Senior scientific advisers to the Government have repeatedly
asked for this information to help them assess how much BSE- infected material
went into the human food chain ñ particularly as baby food. The
information is crucial in predicting the future course of the epidemic
of variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease ñ BSE in humans ñ which
has so far killed 97 people.
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- Although the British Meat Manufacturers Association said
it will co-operate with an investigation into the use of MRM by the Food
Standards Agency, it has not told the agency about the list. The FSA was
not even aware of the list's existence until told of it yesterday.
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- The list was drawn up as part of a 1997 investigation
into the use of offal by the Leatherhead Food Research Association, an
independent industry body which had been commissioned by the Government
on behalf of scientists sitting on its Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory
Committee (Seac). Bob Hart, the scientist at Leatherhead who wrote the
report, said the British Meat Manufacturers Association collaborated by
sending a questionnaire to 83 of its members. About 50 of them replied
to the questions, which included one about whether they used MRM.
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- The association coded the information so that Dr Hart
did not know the names of the companies. One unnamed food firm said that
it had used "several hundred tons" of MRM in baby food between
1986 and 1990.
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- Scientists within Seac are concerned about MRM because
of the way it is forcibly stripped from cattle bones, including the spinal
cord ñ one of the tissues known to be at highest risk of BSE.
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- Dr Hart said that, in the late 1980s, food companies
in Britain were producing about 5,000 tons of MRM a year. About two tons
of this annual production would have been pure spinal cord, based on an
average contamination level of 0.04 per cent. Dr Hart says in his report
that the estimates are conservative because they assume that spinal cord
material was removed from most cattle carcasses before they were stripped
of MRM.
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- "However, there is likely to be considerable variation
about this figure. The worst case (where all of the vertebral columns contained
intact spinal column) would give 2.8 per cent contamination. In a 100g
meat product, containing 10 per cent of such beef, MRM would contain 0.28g
of spinal cord," the report says.
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- Dr Hart found that production of MRM increased dramatically
between the first half and the last half of the 1980s.
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- "A confidential response from a producer of MRM
quoted production figures of 1,456 tons in the former period and 5,049
tons in the latter," says Dr Hart's report.
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- The British Meat Manufacturers Association kept the raw
data on which the report is based without divulging the names of the companies
who took part, Dr Hart said. This is the information the association now
says it has lost.
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- Two of Britain's leading baby food manufacturers said
yesterday that they have never used MRM containing spinal cord.
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- David Wells, for Heinz, said: "We have never used
beef MRM in any of our products."
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- Dennis Segal, medical director of Cow & Gate, said:
"We have never used meat from the spinal column or any other specified
risk materials in our products. We have always maintained strict controls
over the quality and safety of the meat used in our products."
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- A further statement from Cow & Gate says: "For
a short period (1983-1988), mechanical separation was used to obtain the
meat for our jar foods, however our suppliers were regularly audited to
ensure that offal, or meat from the spinal column, was specifically excluded
from the process. This process is no longer used for any of our products."
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- However, it is clear from the Leatherhead report that
tons of MRM, possibly containing many thousands of doses of BSE, ended
up in baby food.
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- The Food Standards Agency now intends to pursue the issue
with the British Meat Manufacturers Association. "We will expect the
association to provide us with this and any other data on MRM," a
spokesman for the FSA said.
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- Risk factors ï Mechanically recovered meat (MRM)
is considered the most likely risk factor in the transmission of BSE from
cattle to humans because it almost certainly contained high levels of infected
spinal cord material.
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- ï After meat is trimmed from the carcasses, any
remnants are blasted away from the bone using high-pressure water hoses.
The resulting slurry or "paste" is used to bulk up cheaper products
such as meat pies, sausages and burgers.
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- ï It is estimated 10 per cent of the weight of some
products would have contained MRM. Britain was producing 5,000 tons per
year at the end of the 1980s.
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- ï The Government banned the use of beef MRM in 1995
when it was realised segments of spinal cord were still entering the food
chain six years after it was prohibited.
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- http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=88185
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