Poisoned eggs may have been served to millions at restaurants

POISON eggs may have been served to millions of consumers in restaurant food, it has emerged, as watchdogs have admitted the scandal is widening.

Last week supermarkets were forced to withdraw sandwiches and salads after an official alert warned that 700,000 eggs contaminated with a pesticide called fipronil had entered the UK.

Initially the Food Standards Agency (FSA) had insisted that only 21,000 contaminated eggs had reached the UK.

Now the FSA has announced that the scale of the problem is far greater and has admitted it does not yet know the names of affected restaurants.

Yesterday it announced that Cocovite liquid eggs, which come from Belgium and are widely used by restaurants and caterers in cooking, are urgently being withdrawn as they may be contaminated. It is thought that much of the infected produce will have already been eaten.

The FSA said: “The egg in these foods may have been supplied from affected farms in the Netherlands before the blocks on these farms were imposed. It was incorporated into processed foods; fresh eggs on sale in the UK remain unaffected.

“Most of the additional egg products that have been identified were imported into the UK in liquid form so it is no longer practicable to provide a figure in terms of whole eggs.

“However, it remains the case that the egg we have identified represents only a fraction of a single percentage of the eggs we consume in the UK every year.”

It comes as shoppers are staging a backlash against British supermarkets, as a third are refusing to buy shopbought sandwiches and salads unless the eggs they contain are British.

Supermarkets have been accused of hypocrisy as they use cheaper foreign eggs as ingredients in pre-prepared food, while making a point of only selling raw boxed eggs carrying the British Lion quality logo.

The British Lion symbol tells consumers that the eggs are British-laid and have been vaccinated against salmonella. Around 85 per cent of boxed eggs sold in the UK carry the logo.

The Food Standards Agency has said the risk to human health is very low as a result of the scandal.

Forensic scientists estimate that someone would need to eat 20,000 eggs in one sitting to become ill from fipronil poisoning.