The Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) has accused the Food Standards Agency (FSA) of misinformation regarding the meat industry following a posting on its website about campylobacter, which could not be supported by a research paper.
According to AIMS, using postings from the FSA’s website a recently published trade publication article about campylobacter carried the statement: “Campylobacter is believed to cause up to 280,000 cases of food poisoning a year, leading to 100 deaths and costing the UK economy roughly £900m.”
However, the FSA’s source is believed to be an extract from the id2 paper1, funded by FSA itself, which does not support the claim that food poisoning leads to 100 campylobacter deaths a year in the UK.
Instead the paper is said to state: “We could not estimate deaths attributable to foodbourne illness, due to the lack of reliable data sources on pathogen-specific mortality rates.”
AIMS head of policy, Norman Bagley, said: “Selectively quoting from its own commissioned report on its own website has once again undermined the excellent work and progress the industry has made on combating campylobacter.
“Stating that campylobacter causes 100 deaths a year is just not based on science and leads to continuing scary, misleading stories being carried in both the trade and consumer media, which once again, undermines our sector. This is far from helpful and needs to stop.”
Speaking to Meat Management, a spokesperson from the FSA responded: "We explain on our website that the campylobacter deaths figure is a previous estimate, and that we are continuing to analyse the full impact that campylobacter has. We are determining which updated figures to use in the future.
"Over the past five years we have been using our sampling data to expose the levels of campylobacter, because this dangerous but naturally occurring pathogen on poultry in the UK is the leading cause of food poisoning. Helping consumers understand the risks, working with producers and retailers, setting targets for reduction, sharing knowledge and data, pushing everybody them to work together to find new ways of doing things, we have reduced campylobacter to a level that they said wasn't possible five years ago. Next year thousands fewer people will get seriously ill because of the work we've all done."
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
