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While government authorities in Spain have yet to conduct such tests, the Spanish consumer rights watchdog OCU announced this week it had commissioned DNA tests on 20 factory-made burger products
-- and found two that contained horse meat. The OCU tests could only identify the presence of equine DNA, not its quantity. Ireland conducted the DNA tests in one of its own labs, which found the presence of
horse meat, and sent the samples to a more sophisticated lab in Germany to break down the precise quantities of each species of meat in each sample burger. "This sort of species testing simply has not been done in other nations. It looks like that's going to change," said Patrick Wall, the professor of public health at University College Dublin and former chairman of the Food Safety Authority for the 27-nation European Union. Silvercrest supplied most of the supermarket chains in Ireland and Britain. After the Irish findings Jan. 15, Silvercrest withdrew about 10 million burgers from those stores. It suspended all production a week later once a second round of DNA tests found more
horse meat traces in recently produced burgers. Silvercrest's parent company, ABP Food Group, said in a statement it understood Tesco's decision and would introduce its own random DNA testing of products at all of its facilities in Ireland and Britain. Other Irish processors say they plan to follow suit. Food policy experts say meat labels may eventually be changed in many countries to reflect the kind of warnings already familiar for people allergic to nuts: This beef product may contain traces of other animals. Wall said consumers shouldn't be unduly unsettled by the Irish findings, which included results showing that most cheaply produced "beef" burgers also contained minute elements of pork. He said such molecular transfers were almost impossible to prevent though, until now they hadn't been measured. "People need to understand how sensitive these DNA tests are," Wall said. "This thing will pick up molecules. So if
horse meat traveled in a refrigerated lorry one day and beef was carried in it the next day, molecules would travel over." He also said if both horse and beef were processed at the same facility "you could get a carry-over of molecules."
[Associated
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