HEALTH RISK:A FULL and final risk assessment had not been carried out when the Government assured the public at the weekend that the risks posed by contaminated pork was very low, it emerged yesterday.
Prof James Heffron, a specialist on the biochemistry of detoxification at UCC's biochemical toxicology laboratory, said these risk assessment calculations were tricky and could be expected to take a number of days.
He said the assessment was now being carried out by an expert group assembled by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, and he expected the results of this assessment to be known this week.
"The final calculations haven't been done," he said.
Prof Heffron, who was invited to join the expert group this week, said the Government's weekend comments, when pork was withdrawn, that the risk to public health was very low were, therefore, "somewhat premature".
"It would have been better, I would have thought, if they said they were looking into it in more detail to perform the final risk assessment" and just said "the indications are" that the risk would be low because the length of the exposure was only three months.
Speaking during a briefing on dioxins at TCD science gallery, he said the World Health Organisation stipulated a person should not consume more than one to four picograms of dioxins per 1kg of body weight daily over their lifetimes. A picogram is a million millionth of a gramme.
The PCB dioxin-like compounds should never have got into the meal fed to pigs and cattle because they were banned, he said.
"They should have been monitoring more closely what was happening in the early stages of the food chain", which seemed to be "the weakest link".
Also speaking at the briefing, Alan Matthews, professor of European agricultural policy at the department of economics at Trinity College, said there had been a lot of comment on how much the pork contamination crisis would cost and who would carry this cost.
While there were various figures quoted in the media, he believed at this point it was impossible to put any firm figure on the cost.
He said the cost of a much bigger dioxin contamination scandal in Belgium, which resulted even in Belgian chocolates being withdrawn, had cost that country $1.5 billion (US dollars). "I don't think we are anything like that."
It puzzled him that a blanket ban was imposed on all pork here when some pigs got nowhere near the contaminated meal.
"One just wonders why the traceability system isn't working to actually allow that meat, which presumably is in cold store in the pig plants, why that isn't now on the supermarket shelves."
He said in principle it did not seem to him to be desirable to have a system whereby the food industry offloads the cost of risks on to the taxpayer. However, this was a crisis the country was not prepared for, so it made sense to provide some sort of compensation package.
Furthermore, the idea that there was a fund for this in Europe was pure speculation.
"I think what the Taoiseach seems to be counting on a little bit is that we have possibly a rerun of a referendum coming next year and I'd say he's saying very hard to the European community 'look, if you want to see this passed, here's your chance to actually make a positive impact on the Irish public' . . . He seems to be playing a political card."