Pigmeat oil problem unknown before Irish scare
Lab tests have indicated that the source of pork contamination was use of contaminated or inappropriate oil to fire a burner used for generating heat to dry bread, which was being recycled into animal feed.
The oil showed a high level of PCB contamination, which should not be found in oil in normal circulation, the Joint Committee on Agriculture, Fisheries and Food hearing on the matter was told by Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food secretary general Tom Moran.
No positive dioxin findings had previously been made in Ireland’s national residue monitoring — including random monitoring of a sample on August 6 from the pig herd of a bread crumb manufacturer now being investigated by Government agencies, with the assistance of the Garda and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Destruction of about 130,000 pigs is continuing in the aftermath of the pork dioxin scare. Up to January, about 50,000 had been slaughtered, and a further 40,000 were to be slaughtered up to last weekend.
“We are still in discussion with farmers on how to deal with the outstanding pig population, mainly the sows,” last week’s committee hearing was told by Mr Moran.
He said, “We have had an expert team examining the possibility of excluding breeding sows. The advice to the Department from the expert group was that we would not be able to allow sows to stand and continue to breed if they had been contaminated with the feed.”
He revealed the food scare emerged on Friday, November 28, when marker polychlorinated biphenols were detected in routine national residue monitoring of pork fat from pigs slaughtered at a plant in Drumlish, Co Longford. A farm in Co Cork was identified as the source of the pigs.
On Saturday, December 6, the central science laboratory in York confirmed the presence of dioxins in the pork fat samples.
