- Scientists are meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to try
and resolve Europe's latest food scandal: illegal steroid hormones in animal
feed, meat and even soft drinks. The contamination may involve eight of
the 15 European Union countries, including Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany,
France and Spain.
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- Before the meeting began, the European Commissioner for
health and consumer protection, David Byrne, blamed the incident on "fraudulent
exchange and disposal of pharmaceutical waste", and pledged new controls
on animal feed.
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- The first signs of trouble emerged in early July on Dutch
pig farms with a wave of infertility among sows. Tests of the pigs' feed
revealed medroxy progesterone acetate (MPA), a synthetic progesterone that
can cause infertility.
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- MPA is a widely-used ingredient in human birth control
pills and hormone replacement therapy. It is also used as a growth promoter
for livestock in North America and Australia. But hormonal growth promoters
are illegal in the EU.
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- Sugar Coated
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- The MPA was traced to the now-bankrupt firm Bioland in
Arendonk, Belgium, which had sold tainted glucose syrup to feed producers.
Bioland made the syrup from waste water containing sugar, which came from
a plant near Dublin, Ireland owned by the US firm Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.
The water was left over from the process of sugar-coating hormone pills.
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- There are reports that Bioland did not have a license
to handle pharmaceutical waste, or to make human food. But the Belgian
Federal Agency for the Safety of the Food Chain announced on 8 July that
they had also traced Bioland glucose syrup to two soft drinks companies.
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- In drink samples taken in 2001, they found MPA in excess
of legal limits. The agency did not identify the drinks that were contaminated,
but said they "are no longer in circulation".
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- But the contaminated feed is. Germany alone imported
8500 tonnes. More than 1300 German farms thought to have bought the product
are now forbidden to sell animals for slaughter until their feed has been
tested and cleared.
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- The Dutch authorities are testing all pigs at slaughter
for MPA. And Dutch farmers are now suing Wyeth and the Irish waste handler
who sold the sugar-water.
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- Dioxin and PCBs
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- On Tuesday, the European Commission's scientific standing
committee on the food chain is discussing the situation. One likely recommendation
will be that the Commission speeds up a proposed list of ingredients to
be permitted in animal feed. The EU currently states only what is not permitted
in feed.
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- The Commission promised the list after the 1999 Belgian
scandal in which livestock ate dioxin and PCB-laced feed, but has yet to
produce it. In the meantime, the food scandals have continued.
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- There was another dioxin incident in Belgium in January
2002, while in May 2002, a banned pesticide, nitrofen, turned up in feed
grain in Germany after it was stored in warehouses in the former East Germany,
where nitrofen was used.
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- http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99992551
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