06.01.2011

The European Union wants Germany to reveal the full extent of the dioxin scandal in Germany. 

A spokesperson for EU Commissioner for Health and Consumer Policy, John Dalli, on Tuesday demanded to know whether contaminated eggs or meat had been exported to other member states.
The poisonous chemical dioxin was discovered in eggs and poultry last week.
The European Union has legally binding limits for concentrations of dioxins in foodstuffs.
The level for eggs has been set to 3 pg TEQ (Toxic Equivalents) per gram egg fat (one egg contains approximately 6 grams of fat). The levels discovered in the contaminated eggs in Germany "far exceeded" these limits.

The affected farms are believed to have purchased animal feed contaminated with dioxin from a facility in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein which, in turn, received toxic products from a dealer in the Netherlands.

The German feed manufacturer Harles & Jentzsch in Schleswig-Holstein said on Tuesday that for years it had been mixing waste from biodiesel production into animal feed.

Company chief Siegfried Sievert said he had assumed that the fatty acid waste from palm, soy and rapeseed oil used to make biofuels and supplied by the Dutch company was suitable for animal feed.

The German biodiesel company, Petrotec, which supplied the fatty acids to the Dutch feed dealer, said its products were for industrial lubricants only and not intended for animal feed.

Eggs potentially containing toxic dioxin that caused a health scare in Germany were exported to the Netherlands, amid concerns they ended up in processed foods such as mayonnaise. Germany's agriculture ministry had said earlier that a total of 136,000 eggs were delivered to a firm in the Netherlands from the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt.