EU egg probe widens

IN A new twist in Europe’s tainted egg scandal yesterday Dutch authorities announced they had started testing chicken meat coming from affected poultry farms to determine whether it, too, was contaminated.

Scientists are looking for the presence of the insecticide fipronil, a substance potentially dangerous to humans, after supermarkets in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden and Switzerland pulled millions of eggs from the shelves.

“We are currently testing chicken meat in the poultry farms where eggs were infected to determine whether the meat is contaminated as well,” Tjitte Mastenbroek, spokesman for food security agency NVWA, said.

The probe focuses on “a few dozen” farms that produce both eggs and chicken meat, NVWA said.

Millions of chickens now face being culled in the Netherlands as the scandal widens across Europe.

Hard-hit Germany yesterday called on Belgian and Dutch authorities to quickly shed light on what it termed a “criminal network” involved in the contamination of eggs with fipronil.

“When one sees a criminal energy that’s almost organised as a network it’s unacceptable,” German Agriculture Minister Christian Schmidt said.

He again criticised Belgian and Dutch authorities’ tardy response to the crisis.

Belgium’s top agricultural official on Monday ordered the country’s food safety agency to report within a day why it failed to notify neighbouring countries until July 20 despite knowing about fipronil contamination since June.

“It’s not in the spirit of the early warning system to be aware in June but only to inform us by the end of July,” Schmidt said.

Mastenbroek said that a criminal probe by the NVWA under Dutch prosecution authorities and assisted by Belgium is continuing, looking at the role of companies in contaminating Dutch poultry farms with fipronil.

Meanwhile, the French govern- ment said on Monday “thirteen batches of contaminated eggs from The Netherlands” were delivered in July to food processing companies located in centralwestern France.

Currently Dutch authorities have closed down 138 poultry farms – about a fifth of those across the country – and warned that eggs from another 59 farms contained enough levels of fipronil that they should not be eaten by children.

Other European countries like Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, Portugal and Romania said they were analysing imported eggs, but so far no contaminated eggs were found.