March 6, 2013

Germany conducts test on milk for carcinogen content

Germany has conducted safety tests on milk last week, after it was revealed that thousands of farms had used animals feed contaminated with high levels of carcinogen aflatoxin B1.

Thousands of tonnes of poisonous animal feed were delivered to 4,467 farms in Lower Saxony alone, including 968 dairy farms, the state's agricultural ministry confirmed.

Aflatoxin B1, one of the strongest known naturally-occuring carcinogens, is produced by the Aspergillus mould, which can develop on grains when left in warm and damp conditions. German authorities banned milk deliveries from hundreds of dairy farms last week, fearing that milk from cows, fed up to 30 times the accepted levels of aflatoxin, could also contain the cancer-causing substance.

"Aflatoxins are especially dangerous in milk," said Udo Paschedag, state secretary of the ministry.

The ministry said it believed there was no risk to consumers after initial test results showed that milk, from 79 affected farms, contained low traces of carcinogen. Tests are currently being carried out on the remaining farms.

The ministry said it had tracked the breach to a shipment of 40,000 tonnes of corn from Serbia, 10,000 tonnes of which was processed into animal feed for chickens, cows and pigs.

While authorities say meat and eggs from animals, which have ingested the cancer-causing substance, are not dangerous to human health, they have yet to confirm whether offal from the affected animals is safe for consumption.

Anger among consumers grew as the scale of the breach became known, the third food scandal to hit Germany within a month. German egg farmers are also currently under investigation for allegedly false-labelling battery chickens' eggs as organic.