TESTS BEING carried out on the dioxin levels in cattle exposed to contaminated feed from the Co Carlow plant at the centre of the pork scare will not be available until the middle of this week.
Alan Reilly of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) said all animals fed on the material had been identified and were restricted under lock and key and could not in any way affect food safety.
“We will not get the results back until the middle of the week and then we will be doing our assessment on them and we will make these public,” he said.
“Much will depend on the levels of this feed which ended up in the cattle rations and we will get an overall picture of this from the results,” Mr Reilly, who is deputy chief executive of the FSAI, said.
Nearly 10,000 cattle on 45 farms across the State have been restricted and sample testing of them continues.
Mr Reilly also confirmed that one of three samples of pig feed sent to the Britain’s Central Science Laboratory had extremely high levels of dioxin.
“Two of the three samples of pig feed came back low but one of them, crumb, was extremely high, a level of 5,200 nanograms per kilogram,” he said. A nanogram is one billionth of a gram
He said in relation to the cattle involved in consumption of the contaminated feed, some may have been fed more and some less than others.
Mr Reilly said he wanted to counter criticisms that the authority had moved too swiftly last week when dioxin levels were found in pork.
“We had to move immediately when we discovered the levels involved in the pork because it would have been illegal to continue to allow output at that time.
“We could not allow a situation where we knew that untraced pork in the system would be sold so the decision to recall all product was the only way to address this situation.”
Meanwhile, the campaign to recover markets endangered by the pork recall continues. It is expected that Minister for Agriculture Brendan Smith will travel to Italy later this week to meet officials. Meat importers there are experiencing difficulties over veterinary certification for both pork and beef products.
While the European markets take 90 per cent of Ireland’s beef export output, officials from the Irish Food Board will be addressing what it called the “temporary interruption of trade to Russia and China”.
Both countries have suspended further imports of Irish pigmeat but have not banned the import of Irish beef.
As the trade continues to settle down at home and abroad, a report suggesting that Irish consumers would be levied on all meat purchases, to pay for the €180 million deal which reopened the pig plants, could not be confirmed.