DIOXIN: Dioxin Crisis Topples Belgian Government

["Jackie Hunt Christensen" <jchristensen@iatp.org>]

Dioxin Crisis Topples Belgian Government

BRUSSELS, Belgium, June 15, 1999 (ENS) - A crushing election defeat for
Belgium's governing coalition in Sunday's national elections has followed
Europe's worst food contamination crisis since mad cow disease.

Contaminated animal feed has been blamed for causing dangerously high
levels of the cancer-causing chemical dioxin in Belgian chicken, beef,
pork, eggs, milk and byproducts. Worse, the government is said to have
known about the contamination but withheld that information from the public
and the European Union.

All four of the Flemish and French-speaking Socialist and Christian
Democrat governing parties lost votes, while some right-wing parties and
Belgium's two Green parties scored extraordinary gains that could take them
into government.

In polls leading up to the election, as many as one in every three Belgians
said they planned to switch their voting intentions as a result of the food
scandal. The dioxins discovered in Belgian foods in May have emptied
Belgian shops of meat and milk products and led to a legion of bans on
Belgian, and in some cases all European Union foods, all over the world.
On Friday, just before the election, Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene
returned the meats, milk and eggs to Belgian shops. He said the government
has lists of safe farms. Seventeen percent of the country’s cattle farms,
40 percent of pork companies and nearly 50 percent of poultry farms are
prohibited from marketing their products.

Latest developments in the saga include a call by European agriculture
ministers meeting in Brussels today for new controls on the manufacture of
animal feeds. 

Ministers have asked the European Commission to check on current
implementation of early warning systems around the European Union and to
propose improvements, as well as to undertake a "critical review" of the
problems of meat meal and offals plus the disposal of animal carcasses.

Meanwhile, the Swiss government said today that it is restricting exports
of used food oils, which are thought to be the intermediate source of the
Belgian dioxin contamination. According to the Swiss environment agency,
used food oils from public collection points will no longer be usable to
make animal feeds.

In the Netherlands, the government has indicated that tests show no traces
of dioxin contamination in milk products. The French government said
yesterday that no dioxins had been found in chickens, eggs or beef.

Europe's animal feed makers' association has reacted by calling for tighter
controls on the raw materials used in animal feed manufacture. The crisis
has shown that "existing quality controls...have been inadequate to protect
public health," according to the Fédération Européenne des Fabricants
d'Aliments Composés pour Animaux.

About 1,500 farms used animal feed manufactured by ten companies. Each of
them were supplied by the same fat supplier in Gent - the source of the
dioxin contamination.

The original source of the contamination that entered the food chain in
Belgium now appears to be waste PCB oils, possibly illegally disposed of
into food oils. According to the European chlorine industry association
Eurochlor, official data from the Belgian government shows that the profile
of dioxins and closely related furans found in contaminated foods are
completely different from those found in combustion products and are
similar to those found in PCBs.

Toxic, persistent and bioaccumulative, PCBs were banned from sale in the
European Union in 1985 but can continue to be used in existing electrical
transformers until 2010. The chemicals are also suspected to disrupt
hormone systems.

Similar incidences of waste PCBs contaminating food supplies occurred in
Asia in the 1960s and 1970s.