Tiger bites back

and I’m sure he was speaking legalistically. But on our side we have formed that link between the outbreak and the Enterprise food facility in Polokwane.”

But, says Tiger’s head of communication Nevashnee Naicker, the company has always had testing for listeria, as part of standard safe- ty protocols, and did not detect the bacteria in its meat products

“under normal testing protocol”.

Then, on February 2, Tiger was visited by a delegation of about 40 health officials, including members of the World Health Organisation, for what Juno Thomas, the head of the Centre for Enteric Diseases at the National Institute of Communicable Diseases (NICD) called a “swabathon” of the company’s Polokwane Enterprise plant.

Naicker says: “They came to us because there were children who became ill and it was linked to three products” — one of them a Tiger Brands product.

The department says of 300 samples taken, a staggering 30% came back positive with listeria.

Tiger, meanwhile, says it replicated the tests, which came back negative for all its products, but showed “low levels” of environmental listeria present, on

February 14.

At that point, it withdrew its “Mielie-kip” polony from trade and says it began heightened testing — from every day to every hour.

The company then met with the health department on February 23 to share its findings. This is at odds with the department’s assertions that food companies like

Tiger had hampered the NICD’S attempts to trace the source of the listeria outbreak. Tiger still doesn’t have access to the test results that the ministry appears to be using — nor does it have clarity that the environmental swabs referenced by the department showed evidence of a particular strain of listeria, known as ST 6.