French deny risk to health from contaminated feed

The French government has made no attempt whatsoever to trace meat and bonemeal contaminated by sewage in six French plants as late as April 1999, "because there is no health risk", Mrs Marylise Lebranchu, the junior minister responsible for consumer affairs told a press conference here yesterday.

Yet the use of sewage sludge for the production of animal meal has been forbidden in France since 1989 and throughout the European Union since 1991.

Mrs Lebranchu spoke before the scheduled arrival last night of two EU inspectors from Brussels. The inspectors are to visit three renderers (which boil down slaughtered carcasses to make animal meal) and a gelatine factory cited by the French government in its response to an EU Commission inquiry.

Mrs Lebranchu admitted that there were in fact six French plants caught using sewage sludge in the fabrication of animal meal.

She did not explain the discrepancy between the four sites mentioned in her office's report to Brussels and the six revealed yesterday. Health violations were so widespread in a Compiegne slaughterhouse and renderer that the plant had to be shut down.

The other five - 10 per cent of the 50 meat and bonemeal plants in France - were inspected between three and six times each between November 1998 and April 1999 to ensure that they had ceased the practice "which was widespread a few years ago", she said.

The German supermarket chain, Edeka, has withdrawn French chicken from its 11,000 shops. On Tuesday, British chicken growers appealed to Prime Minister Blair to do the same.

"At a time when Great Britain is asking us to make an effort to import their beef again, I would not understand [if Britain banned French chicken]," Mrs Lebranchu said. "There is no comparison [between the risk of BSE from British beef and risk from French chickens]."

Asked by The Irish Times what efforts had been made to remove sewage contaminated meal, or animals fed with it, from circulation, Mrs Lebranchu laughed and replied: "I think some of the chickens have already been eaten. I probably ate some of them myself, and I don't feel any the worse for it. If there was any risk, we would have followed it up, but there is no risk." Under EU regulations, all meat and bone meal is sterilised at 133C for 20 minutes.

A documentary, shown on German ARD television last week and based on a report in the French satirical weekly Canard Enchaine, said the waste re-cycled into animal feed in the plants could transmit dangerous bacteria.

Mrs Lebranchu said there was a widespread misperception that sludge from municipal sewage plants containing human faeces had been used, whereas the sludge came from waste water treatment plants internal to the slaughterhouses. She admitted that, in two plants, staff toilets led to septic tanks connected to the treatment plants where sludge was taken for making animal feed.

Ideally, she would like to stop the use of meat and bonemeal altogether, but this raised the problem of destroying the carcasses. "You can't just throw them in empty quarries," she said. "In my district, the local population refused to accept an incinerator."

Germany currently has no plans to join North America in barring blood donations from people from Britain to prevent the possible spread of the human equivalent of mad cow disease, Mr Johannes Loewer of the Paul Ehrlich Institute said in Berlin yesterday.

Blood banks in the US and Canada were ordered on Tuesday to stop collecting donations from people who spent more than six months in Britain during the mad cow outbreak.