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Britain Says Equine Drug May Have Entered Food Chain Britain Says Equine Drug May Have Entered Food Chain
(about 11 hours later)
LONDON — A crisis over horse meat in European food products deepened on Thursday when British officials said tests showed that a powerful equine drug, potentially harmful to human health, may have entered the food chain in small quantities. PARIS — The scandal over horse meat in the European food chain widened Thursday from a case of mislabeling to one of food safety as public health authorities in Britain said that a powerful equine painkiller, potentially harmful to human health, “may have entered the food chain” in France.
Until now, the crisis had been seen primarily as an issue of fraud after products containing horse meat were labeled beef, with politicians insisting that, even if millions of products sold as beef contained up to 100 percent horse meat, food safety was not at issue. British officials sought to reassure the public that the drug — phenylbutazone, or bute, an anti-inflammatory used commonly on lame horses — was found only in trace amounts in a small number of British horse carcasses. Out of 206 carcasses, 8 tested positive for bute, and just 6 of those carcasses were exported to France.
But on Thursday came the first admission that a banned substance, phenylbutazone, known as bute, could have entered the food chain in horse meat. The drug is also used to treat arthritis in humans, and very large doses can cause a potentially fatal blood disorder, aplastic anemia, in which the bone marrow fails to produce enough blood cells.
The British Food Standards Agency said that it had checked the carcasses of 206 horses slaughtered in Britain between Jan. 30 and Feb. 7. “Of these, eight tested positive for the drug,” it said in a statement. Six had been slaughtered at a plant in Taunton, Somerset, and “were sent to France and may have entered the food chain,” the statement said. The other two did not leave a different British slaughterhouse and have now been disposed of in accordance with the rules, the statement said. “The F.S.A. is gathering information on the six carcasses sent to France and will work with the French authorities to trace them,” it added. Even before the discovery, the scandal had plunged the European food industry into crisis. Frozen foods, including hamburger, lasagna, spaghetti Bolognese and moussaka, have been withdrawn from supermarket freezers in Britain, Ireland, Sweden, France and Germany.
Because there is little demand for horse meat in Britain, it is not uncommon for carcasses to be exported to France. The British and French authorities were trying to trace the meat, but as yet have not identified any products directly affected. But the positive tests for the equine drug have raised fresh concerns, even in countries like France, where eating horse meat is more acceptable than in Britain, where it is taboo. Unlike cattle, which are raised for slaughter in controlled conditions, the lame horses or former plow animals that are sometimes slaughtered for consumption do not carry the same guarantees of origin or quality.
The scandal has already plunged the British food industry into crisis with millions of products being withdrawn from supermarket freezer counters, initially in Britain and Ireland. But other countries, including Sweden and Germany, have been affected, too. “Unscrupulous criminal elements have been profiting from these unfortunate animals by exploiting a hopelessly flawed horse passport scheme, lax animal export controls at ports and slaughterhouses willing to compromise animal welfare and public safety for a quick profit,” said David Wilson, the spokesman for the Ulster Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in Northern Ireland. Suspect frozen beef hamburgers discovered in Ireland first triggered the crisis.
Officials in Britain tried to reassure the public. “Horse meat containing phenylbutazone presents a very low risk to human health,” Britain’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, said in a statement Thursday. “Many horses that are either valueless or in suffering are being corralled in remote farmyards and packed into vehicles for transport to abattoirs in Ireland and the U.K.,” he said. “After slaughter, many are processed and find their way effortlessly into the European food chain.”
“Phenylbutazone, known as bute, is a commonly used medicine in horses,” she said. “It is also prescribed to some patients who are suffering from a severe form of arthritis. At the levels of bute that have been found, a person would have to eat 500-600 100 hundred percent horse meat burgers a day to get close to consuming a human’s daily dose.” Health experts said that at the level found, a human would have to eat 500 or 600 burgers a day of 100 percent horse meat to be adversely affected.
“And it passes through the system fairly quickly, so it is unlikely to build up in our bodies,” she added. The police investigating allegations that horse meat was mislabeled as beef said Thursday that they had arrested two men in Wales and another man in West Yorkshire, England, on Tuesday and were holding them on suspicion of fraud.
“In patients who have been taking phenylbutazone as a medicine there can be serious side effects, but these are rare. It is extremely unlikely that anyone who has eaten horse meat containing bute will experience one of these side effects.” Checking food safety “from farm to fork” in Europe has been a persistent worry for two decades, since the crisis of mad cow disease in Britain threw the continent into a crisis and prompted a ban on British beef exports to Europe and the United States.
The widening scandal began when beef products on sale in several European Union countries were found to contain horse meat. The current scandal has laid bare a supply chain for meat so murky and complex that officials and experts say it is easily susceptible to fraud and manipulation by organized crime. The convoluted route from slaughterhouse to plate has highlighted a weak system of accountability in a vast single market of almost 500 million people, where retailers use layers of meat traders to find the cheapest deals and no regular tests are conducted to authenticate meat products.
“In a cash-rich business like the meat industry, there is ample opportunity for criminals to bribe bureaucrats,” said Misha Glenny, an expert on organized crime in Europe. “Market opportunities create criminal opportunities.”
After days of investigation, French authorities announced on Thursday that they suspected fraud at a French company, Spanghero, which supplied meat — including large quantities of horse meat — to Comigel, a French-owned company whose Luxembourg factory used the meat to make frozen meals sold in supermarkets in 16 countries across Europe, including Britain and Sweden. They said they would suspend Spanghero’s operating license. The company denied any wrongdoing.
The French investigators said that the meat Spanghero sold to Comigel had originated in two Romanian slaughterhouses, in a shipment they said showed clues of containing horse meat. It was then bought by a Dutch food trader who sold it to a Cypriot-registered food trader who sent it to Spanghero.
“The investigation shows that Spanghero knew that the meat labeled as beef could be horse,” Benoît Hamon, France’s junior minister for social economy, said Thursday. “There was a strong suspicion.” Mr. Hamon added that the fraudulent meat sales had been going on for several months, and involved 28 companies and 13 countries.
Mr. Hamon said that Comigel should have suspected something was amiss. While Comigel maintained it did not realize the meat was not beef, he said, anyone in the business should have been able to tell the difference.
In a statement, Spanghero said that it was the victim, not the perpetrator, of the fraud. “Spanghero confirms having placed an order for beef, having been led to believe it received beef, and having sold back what it thought was beef, properly labeled as such, in line with European and French regulations.”
Chris Elliott, director of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University, Belfast, said the complex supply chain was vulnerable to fraud since the contents of meat shipments were not routinely verified.
“There are multiple contracts in these supply chains, and the contracts are very tight,” he said. “But there are absolutely no checks. It is really done on trust that the piece of paper that says that you have five tons of beef is beef. There is no verification of the audit trail.”
Spanghero said earlier that it will sue its Romanian suppliers, though French authorities say those suppliers acted in good faith and properly labeled their shipment as horse meat.
“We have respected all of the labeling laws,” Iulian Cazacut, the director of the meatpacking plant, Doly-Com, in Romania’s impoverished northeast, said in an interview. “I am not responsible for the mistakes of others.”
Mr. Cazacut said the company, which processed 427 tons of horse last year, bought horses, no longer fit for work, from local farmers for around 60 cents a pound, far less than the approximately $2.50 a pound fetched by beef.

Dan Bilefsky reported from Paris, and Stephen Castle from London. Reporting was contributed by George Calin from Bucharest, Romania; Andrew Higgins from Brussels; Douglas Dalby from Dublin; and Melissa Eddy from Berlin.