APA News
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Horse meat scare offers food for thought
Past President Dr Duncan Campbell is quoted in an article in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s on-line edition of Chemistry World as saying ‘I think that nationally local authorities now spend less than £5 million each year on analysis carried out by public analysts for food law enforcement. For county councils [in England], the number of food samples that are taken for analysis by public analysts has fallen by 47% in the three years to March 2012’.
During the current debate some mention has been made of sampling and the work of Public Analysts. When giving evidence at the Environment food and Rural Affairs Select Committee Hearing on the 30th January Food Standards Agency Chair Lord Rooker stated that 80,000 samples were taken annually of which 20 000 were food standards samples. This may seem like a lot, but Tesco has 272 different types of yoghurt on its shelves and 20,000 samples equates to one sample for very 3,000 people. In Germany there is a general administrative agreement regarding food safety that requires their authorities to take five sample per thousand inhabitants annually. For the UK this would equate to 315,000 samples, nearly four times the number taken at present. The Local Authority Enforcement Monitoring System (LAEMS) data that is available on the Food Standards Agency Website shows that some local authorities take no samples at all. Lord Rooker also drew attention to the £2 million funding given to Local Authorities annually for Agency co-ordinated sampling, but did not mention that in some local authorities this has replaced their own sampling rather than supplementing as was the intention.
