Horsemeat, EU: don’t worry, it’s fraud but it won’t hurt you!

There is a new chapter in the horsemeat scandal and the Commission announces that “it is not a question of safety, just food fraud.” As though where OK.

There is a rather positive reading on the results from those tests that Brussels commissioned last February, following the discovery of horsemeat in “beef lasagna” and of the resulting recall of various food products from supermarkets, even Italian ones.

The tests reveal that there are not dangerous quantities of Phenylbutazone, an anti-inflammatory that is noxious for humans, in the meat on the market but at the same time, the tests show that for the average EU countries 1 out of 20 “cow” meat products contain horsemeat.

The Italian tests result positive to the presence of horsemeat higher than 1%, only for 4% of the product tested. Therefore we return on average to 27, and yet even this time we were able to create confusion: communicating wrong numbers to the Commission. On the day when all member countries conferred test results conducted in the last 2 months, our Minister of Health momentarily blocked Brussels because of an oversight. A delay was already communicated in the morning, “There is a discrepancy and the numbers don’t match” EU sources revealed. In fact, a prior note from the Minister indicated that at least 1 product out of 5 was contaminated with horsemeat, too many.

Coldiretti (Food Safety) had already shouted “unprecedented scandal,” when the amendment  arrived: “no mystery on the Italian data,” as it reads in a communiqué from the Minister; there were 361 checks on samples and only 14 resulted positive, less than 4%.

Just under the EU average, which on the other hand had a quantity of horsemeat higher than 1% in 5% of product tested with about .6% of the carcasses analyzed being contaminated by Phenylbutazone, the anti-inflammatory drug administered to race horses that’s dangerous for human health if consumed in large doses.

There were more than 7,000 tests conducted in all, a number higher than the same expectancy from Brussels which had commissioned between 10 and 150 for each government based on the size of the country. Thus some member states wanted to exaggerate in preventative measures. Among these, as we have seen, Italy, but also France with 353 tests, Spain with 189 and in first class Germany which conducted 878. All this cost the states, co-financed by Brussels, about 2.5 million Euro.

Now, as reaffirmed also by Tonio Borg, Commissioner for Health, all that’s left to do is “restore faith to European consumers” and the Commission intends to do that, primarily reassuring the fact that a minimal presence of anti-inflammatory in the products for sale does not constitute a danger to human health. Furthermore Brussels wants to propose that the member states maintain this check against food fraud over time because albeit created for emergency, could still be useful.

Camilla Tagino