The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has performed a review of the European horse meat scandal which began in January when health officials in Ireland announced that they had found horse and pig DNA in products that were supposed to contain only beef. The FSA spent months testing thousands of products throughout the United Kingdom to determine how widespread the problem was. The European Commission also asked member states to carry out testing.
Products containing more than 1 percent horse meat were analyzed for phenylbutazone (bute), an anti-inflammatory drug used commonly in horses that poses a health risk to humans. None of the products was found to contain the drug. The EU has since announced revisions to its food safety laws that include increasing unannounced inspections and upping penalties for food fraud.
Professor Pat Troop, the recently retired Chief Executive of the Health Protection Agency, performed the review by interviewing FSA staff, government employees, members of the food industry and local authorities. She highlighted four key areas: improving intelligence sharing and analysis across the sector, strengthening FSA’s Major Incident Plan, clarifying the role of government departments in these incidents and reviewing the FSA’s powers, use of framework agreements and codes of conduct.
‘The FSA welcomes this report and we will review Professor Troop’s findings in detail,” FSA Chair Jeff Rooker said. “This is the biggest food incident ever handled by the Food Standards Agency and it is important that we learn lessons from our handling – both what worked well and areas that need to be improved.”
Really, no bute found? Why do they state that there was bute found, then suddenly none? Still on with the good ol’ boy cover-ups. No wonder America wants to get on board. This is the largest cover-up EVER~all you have to do is say it was clean and it was clean, sorta like the killer buyers, this horse is drug free, meanwhile, tossing all the prescriptions in the garbage as they walk the horse inside. Please stomp out horse slaughter world wide! and we also need to back trace and people sell horses to kill buyers need to be outed and we also need to make sure after they sold a certain number of animals they be banned from having more horses, those folks who are not responsible breeders or have constantly sent animals to slaughter need to be banned from being in the horse industry.