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Written by The horse painkilling drug phenylbutazone also known as ‘bute’ has been discovered in tins of ASDA ‘Smart Price’ Corned Beef .
The product had already been removed from shelves after they were discovered to contain up to 50% horse meat.
The UK supermarket chain carried out over 700 tests on products when the horse meat scandal broke in which 8 products tested positive fro horse meat.
A spokesman for Asda said the chain has ‘taken a belt and braces approach’ to testing for horse DNA and quickly removed any products from its shelves ‘whenever we’ve had any concerns’.
Andrew Rhodes, director of operations at the Food Standards Agency, acknowledged it takes time to test for bute once horse meat is found in a product.
Speaking on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme, he said: ‘What we have found in this positive test result is a very low level of (bute)… which is only really just above the limit of detection.
‘It’s very unlikely to (do harm). As the chief medical officer has said… it’s extremely rare people have an adverse reaction to phenylbutazone.
‘This is considerably lower than a therapeutic dose and you would have to consume enormous quantities of meat, way more than anyone could physically consume, to get near a therapeutic dose.’
Mr Rhodes said it was important to understand how the product came to be contaminated and how it came to have bute in it.
‘If someone has done something which is illegal, and not taken due measures to prevent that happening, then they can face sanctions,’ he said.
‘But we need to determine exactly what has happened in this case before we can determine whether that will happen or not – which is true of any of the cases we have seen.’
Via: MailOnline
