Tainted feed may be in hundreds of German farms
Date: 17-Jul-02
Country: GERMANY
About 8,500 tonnes of contaminated Belgian-made feed was sent to Germany via the Netherlands in 1,300 consignments, Baerbel Hoehn, agriculture minister in the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia, said on German radio.
"This means hundreds of farms in different (German) federal states will have to be closed," she said.
The German government said on Sunday it had received a warning that large quantities of feed tainted by the growth hormone MPA, or medroxyprogesterone-acetate, delivered from the Netherlands, had been shipped to Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France and back to Belgium.
The government stressed that the contamination was not a serious danger to health.
MPA, while banned in the European Union, is a growth hormone used legally in the United States, Australia and New Zealand. It is also a component of hormone replacement therapies for women in menopause.
Belgian prosecutors are investigating a bankrupt Belgian firm as a possible source of the contamination with the hormone, which scientists believe can cause infertility in humans.
Farms which received tainted feed will be ordered to stop selling their animals.
Meat and animals will then be tested for the hormone. If they test positive, animals may not be sold as meat. Farms testing negative can resume normal work.
German officials were this week also seeking to trace 7,000 pigs imported from Belgium, which possibly received MPA-contaminated feed, but many appeared to have been eaten already.
The Saarland state government said about six tonnes of contaminated pork had been sold to several meat processing companies in its area between early May and the middle of June and had almost certainly been eaten.
The Schleswig-Holstein state government said this week it had traced 80 tonnes of tainted feed mixed in with cattle and horse feed. It said the material was being tested.
Danish authorities said this week that four farms had received tainted cattle feed.
Yesterday, the EU Commission's food and animal feed safety committee will discuss the MPA affair.
In June, Germany was shaken by a separate scare caused by the discovery that feed tainted with the banned herbicide nitrofen, which can cause cancer, had been sent to hundreds of poultry and pig farms.
Hundreds of thousands of chickens and turkeys which had eaten the feed were slaughtered.
