Dutch food safety authorities VWA have culled 80 pigs to test their meat for dioxin contamination after the cancer-causing chemical was found in feed last week, the VWA said on Tuesday. Authorities in the Netherlands, one of the worlds top meat exporters, quarantined 250 farms - mostly pigs - last weekend after finding dioxin in animal feed products that originated from Belgium.

"We have slaughtered 80 pigs from the worst-hit farms. We expect the results of the meat tests in two or three days when we can say whether there is meat contamination and how bad it is," a VWA spokeswoman said.

South Korea banned the import of pork from Belgium and the Netherlands last week when news of the dioxin contamination first broke. The Belgian food safety agency has said the dioxin came from the use of an unfiltered ingredient to extract pig fat from the process of making gelatin at PB Gelatins, a unit of Tessenderlo, a Belgian chemical company.

The extracted fat was later distributed to animal feed producers such as Leroy and Algoet, the Belgian agency has said. The dioxin got into one of the ingredients used to make animal feed in October. Belgian food safety officials have quarantined about 400 pig and chicken farms there and said on Monday they may put more farms under surveillance and test their animals for traces of the toxic chemical. Although meat from contaminated animals might have gone to market, the levels of dioxin were so low that the toxic chemical did not pose a health risk, Belgian authorities said.

Dioxins are one of a number of toxic chemicals that originate in pesticides or industrial processes. They get into rivers and lakes and build up in the flesh of fish and animals.
(Planet Ark, 01/02/06)