Dioxin egg trail leads to Britain: EU

>>Germany closes 4,700 farms for dioxin checks

Health Commissioner John Dalli dubbed the dioxin scare "of utmost importance" and urged it "be pursued with urgency and effectiveness."

His spokesman Frederic Vincent earlier said British authorities were searching for processed food made from the suspect eggs, in order to quarantine a consignment pending checks on whether it is toxic.

Britain was informed Thursday that produce made of the suspect eggs had been exported there, he added, as a search for the whereabouts of the eggs that began December 28 in Germany widened.

Dioxin, a by-product of burning rubbish and industrial activities, can cause miscarriages and other health problems in humans, including cancer.

The scare began when a German firm, Harles und Jentzsch, in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein, was alleged to have supplied up to 3,000 tonnes of contaminated fatty acids meant only for industrial use to animal feed-makers.

Initially thought to involve only two of Germany's 16 states, it later emerged that thousands of tonnes of feed containing the ingredient were delivered to poultry and pig farms in eight states.

More than 1,000 farms in Germany's northwestern state of Lower Saxony alone were told to stop production while tests took place.

Analysis of the fatty acids showed 12 to 16 pictograms of dioxin per gram of fat, or four or five times the accepted level of three pictograms.

A total 136,000 eggs -- nine tonnes -- from suspect poultry farms were delivered to a firm in the Netherlands on December 3 from the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, where they were turned into processed foodstuff.

A first batch of 86,000 eggs, or six tonnes, mixed with Dutch eggs, were processed into 14 tonnes that were exported to Britain as far back as December 12, Vincent said.

The Commission did not know whether the foodstuff had been used in products such as mayonnaise and cake powders, or put into shampoo.

A second batch of 50,000 eggs -- three tonnes -- was exported to the Netherlands December 15 and mixed with 14 tonnes of Dutch eggs to make up three consignments of processed foodstuff.

One of the consignments is in deep freeze in the Netherlands awaiting analysis but the whereabouts of the other consignments remains unknown, the spokesman added.

The European Commission said however that even if the eggs were found to be tainted the contamination would "be weak" and the mix with other eggs "would have diluted it".

Commissioner Dalli discussed the food security scare with the German Federal Food and Agriculture Minister Ilse Aigner on Thursday.

EU experts will examine the case on January 11 and 12 while representatives of the food industry are expected in Brussels next week to discuss how to improve production of fatty acids.

Fears over food security and traceability have been high since the "mad cow" crisis of the late 1990s.

"The scale here cannot be compared to crises in the past," Vincent said. "We have drawn lessons from the past. An alert system is in place."