The Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS) has continued to apply pressure to the Food Standards Agency, saying it has continued to “undermine the meat processing sector”.
AIMS highlighted a recently published article about campylobacter as an example of this.
According to the FSA, it is believed that campylobacter causes up to 280,000 cases of food poisoning a year, leading to 100 deaths and costing the UK economy roughly £900 million.
However, AIMS acknowledged that the source of this extract was taken from the paper: ‘Costed extension to the Second Study of Infectious Intestinal Disease in the Community: Identifying the proportion of foodborne disease in the UK and attributing foodborne disease by food commodity’, which was funded by the FSA.
The paper stated: “We could not estimate deaths attributable to foodborne illness, due to the lack of reliable data sources on pathogen-specific mortality rates.”
FoodWorld 