Showing posts with label James Meikle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Meikle. Show all posts

One in 50 horses slaughtered for food has tested positive for phenylbutazone since introduction of new testing regime


Twenty-two horses slaughtered for food at UK abattoirs since the end of January – one in 50 of the total – have tested positive for the veterinary painkiller phenylbutazone – commonly known as bute, the Food Standards Agency(FSA) has revealed.


In all, 1,042 horses have been tested since the new regime of 100% testing was introduced. The government says the bute presents a very low risk to human health. Most of the positive tests have been found since mid-February, when ministers said no carcasses could leave abattoirs until tests had proved they are clear of the drug.


The figures were released to the Guardian after it emerged that supermarket Asda was recalling a range of budget corned beef because "very low levels of bute" had been found in a product that had previously had traces of horsemeat.


The latest developments in the contamination scandal are likely to fuel concerns that the crisis is not over, even though the corned beef is the only product so far to have tested positive for bute having previously been found to contain more than 1% equine contamination. Forty-four products have so far been named in industry tests.


Sales of frozen burgers and ready meals continued to slump last month. Frozen burger sales slid 32% in the four weeks to March 17, compared with the same period a year before, according to Kantar Worldpanel. That's a slight improvement from the 43% slump recorded in February. Frozen ready meals continued to drop by 12% in March, the same pace as February.


The extra precautions on releasing carcasses after slaughter were introduced after David Heath, the food and agriculture minister, revealed that six out of eight carcasses tested in the first weeks of the scheme had tested positive and six may have entered food in France. He called the presence of bute "unacceptable" and said anyone found to have broken the law would be dealt with.


The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said on Tuesday: "Horse owners are legally responsible for keeping a passport that records the veterinary medicines it has received. Obtaining and using a fraudulent passport is an offence and could lead to a fine of up to £5,000."


Mary Creagh, the shadow environment secretary, said tougher rules must be imposed on the food industry.


"A lot of these products are long-life or frozen so the stick around in people's cupboards and freezers for up to a year. Every product found to be contaminated with horsemeat from the beginning of the scandal should be recalled and we should be absolutely clear about what those products are."


Creagh said the FSA should have publicised a central list of affected products that could be easily accessed by worried shoppers. "Some supermarkets have been clear about it and some have not."


Richard Lloyd, the executive director of Which?, said the continuing scandal exposed the need for urgent changes to the way food fraud was detected and standards enforced.


"These serious failings must be put right if consumers are to feel fully confident in the food they are buying once more.


"Ministers must ensure that everyone involved, including their own departments, the FSA, the food industry and local authorities, are crystal clear about their responsibility to protect consumers and are properly equipped to do so."


Tesco's and Asda's websites name all the products they have tested and those which have failed but several rivals are much more coy about the number of items that have been withdrawn from sale or even found to contain horsemeat.


Discount chain Aldi's website, for example, gives a high profile to information about its use of British meat but fails to mention that two of its frozen ready meals were found to contain horsemeat. The Co-operative's website, gives prominence to a piece boasting that "our latest tests on all our own-brand minced beef products have been confirmed as containing beef and only beef".


The fact that it found horsemeat in some of its own-label frozen burgers, however, is hidden away at the bottom of a press release entitled: "Meat testing – a few words of reassurance."








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via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/apr/10/bute-22-horses-slaughtered-abattoirs
08:06

Children's charity says situation facing young people in UK is expected to worsen as cuts threaten to 'sideline' a generation


Children and young people in the UK are facing a bleaker future under the coalition government than they did under Labour, according to children's charity Unicef.


In what amounts to a direct challenge to the government's austerity agenda and widespread tightening of access to benefits, Unicef ranks the UK 16th out of 29 developed countries for overall wellbeing – and warns that teenagers' prospects trail behind their counterparts in many European countries, including Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Portugal.


Continuing high rates of teenage pregnancy, relatively low levels of young people in education, employment or training and problems of alcohol abuse in young teens push the UK down the international league table.


Unicef said the situation facing young people in Britain is "expected to worsen" as a result of government policies, and it warns that "since 2010 the downgrading of youth policy and cuts to local government services are having a profound negative effect on young people".


Unicef says although the picture for British children may appear better than when the charity last compiled a league table – which put it at the bottom of a 21-country list in 2007 – their prospects are worsening once more as the cuts threaten to "sideline" a generation.


The country is placed 29th on further education – bottom of the list of developed nations in Unicef's report – 27th on teenage pregnancy, and on youth unemployment it is ranked 24th.


The charity's report cites more than £300m – or 26% cuts – in budgets for young people's services in England in 2011-12 and other warnings that 400,000 more children will be in child poverty in 2015-16 from the Family and Parenting Institute and Institute for Fiscal Studies.


Anita Tiessen, the deputy executive director of Unicef UK, said: "There is no doubt that the situation for children and young people has deteriorated in the last three years with the government making policy choices that risk setting back children in their most serious stages of development ….


"The government needs to acknowledge this and act now. While children and young people will be the first to bear the brunt if we fail to safeguard their wellbeing, over time society will pay the price."


The report draws on statistics from 2010 and shows a general improvement in children's experiences over the first decade of this century, compared with the previous scorecard from 2007, which looked at data from 2001/2.


But Unicef says further education participation rates in the UK are falling below 75%, compared with 80% in other developed countries.


The country is in the bottom third of the table for infant mortality, with a rate of 4.4 per 1000 live births, double the rate of Sweden or Finland and below Estonia and Slovenia. Furthermore, the report says that about 20% of 11-15-year-olds in the UK report having been drunk at least twice, and there is a teenage pregnancy rate of more than 30 per 1000.


The Unicef report, which suggests Labour policies in the first decade of the century had paved the way for improvements which are now under threat, follows international charity Save The Children's first domestic fundraising appeal last autumn to help families hit by the cuts and recession.


The overall table was topped by the Netherlands, the only country ranked among the top five countries in all dimensions of child wellbeing.


The first covers both relative poverty and the proportion of children being deprived of access to materials such as three meals a day, books suitable for their age and development, bikes or roller skates, indoor games, appropriate clothing or an internet connection. Others are health and safety, educational wellbeing, proper housing and environment, and a "behaviours and risks" category covering factors such as teenage fertility, smoking, alcohol and cannabis use, fighting, bullying, being overweight or lacking exercise and daily breakfast and fruit.


Following the Netherlands on the overall league table are Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, while at the opposite end, from the bottom, are Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, the US and Greece. Unicef says there does not appear to be a strong relationship with countries' per-capita GDP and there are signs that the countries of central and eastern Europe are being to close the gap on more established industrial economies.


Its report says: "As a moral imperative, the need to promote the wellbeing of children is widely accepted. As a pragmatic imperative, it is equally deserving of priority; failure to protect and promote the wellbeing of children is associated with increased risk across a wide range of later-life outcomes.


The report says that these outcomes range from "impaired cognitive development to lower levels of school achievement, from reduced skills and expectations to lower productivity and earnings, from higher rates of unemployment to increased dependence on welfare, from the prevalence of antisocial behaviour to involvement in crime, from the greater likelihood of drug and alcohol abuse to higher levels of teenage births, and from increased health care costs to a higher incidence of mental illness."






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via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/apr/10/children-bleaker-future-coalition-unicef
08:06

Body taking over running of NHS in England says Nicholson should stay as chief executive


The body that will take over the day-to-day running of the NHS in England from April has backed David Nicholson, currently chief executive of both the NHS and the new NHS commissioning board, in the face of calls for his resignation following the Mid Staffordshire hospital scandal.


Malcolm Grant, who chairs the commissioning board, said he had been "deeply worried" by the speculation over Nicholson's future since the report of the 31-month public inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire NHS foundation trust earlier this month exposed failings across the health service in an excoriating indictment of its attitudes and practices. It made 290 recommendations.


Grant said the board's "clear view" was that Nicholson was fundamental to the success of the reorganisation that will see existing primary care trusts replaced by 221 clinical commissioning groups around the country. The board wanted "very strongly" for Nicholson to remain in charge. Grant said he had discussed the issue with the board's directors before the meeting at which he expressed their decision.


Campaigners walked out of the board meeting, held in public in Manchester, with one crying out "shameful". The board's backing for Nicholson, which follows support from David Cameron, came as pressure mounts on Nicholson to be held accountable for serious failings at the trust between 2005 and 2009. He was chief executive of the regional health body for part of the period in which patients were neglected and poorly treated. He has been chief executive of the NHS since September 2006.


Sixteen MPs, 12 of them Conservatives, have so far called for Nicholson's resignation given his role as chief executive of the West Midlands strategic health authority during the time covered by the inquiry. They have signed a Commons early day motion whose prime sponsor is Charlotte Leslie, the Tory MP for Bristol North West.


Julie Bailey, one of the founders of Cure the NHS, whose mother died at Stafford hospital, was one of about a dozen protesters who stood silently outside the board's office in Manchester where its directors were meeting. She said: "How can we start to cure the NHS when the person who was in charge of those failings is now expected to be in charge of putting it right?"


Nicholson at present splits his responsibilities between the NHS and the commissioning board but will move there full time at the end of next month.


Meanwhile health officials are consulting on whether or not to put the Mid Staffordshire trust into administration in order to "safeguard services" for local patients.


If Monitor, the regulator for foundation trusts, goes ahead with the move, Mid Staffs will be the first foundation trust in the country to be put under the charge of special administrators.






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via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/28/nhs-david-nicholson-mid-staffs
05:35

Government plans to make senior doctors legally responsible for testing EU doctors' language and communication skills


Up to 220 senior doctors in England are to be made legally responsible for checking the language and communications skills of EU doctors coming to work in the UK from April.


The introduction of new rules, to be proposed in a government amendment to medical regulations, will come more than five years after a German doctor accidentally killed a patient on his first UK shift as an out-of-hours GP, exposing failures within the NHS to satisfactorily test medics' linguistic ability before they treated patients.


The case of Daniel Ubani, who administered a 10-fold overdose of painkiller to 70-year-old David Gray in Manea, Cambridgeshire, in February 2008, took more than a year to become public and only did so because two of Gray's sons approached the Guardian following what they believed was lack of action by the authorities.


Between May and September 2009, the Guardian exposed failures in the vetting system for EU and other European doctors seeking work in Britain, which were less rigorous than for doctors from other parts of the world. Before working in the UK, non-European doctors undergo an English test and face a written exam and other assessments by the General Medical Council (GMC).


"These new checks will ensure that all doctors who want to work in the NHS can speak proficient English and to prevent those who can't from treating patients," he said.


New powers for the GMC for it to test EU doctors in English in the same way as it does for others from abroad are also being discussed.


The Guardian revealed that Ubani had withdrawn an application to join a so-called performers list run by the NHS in Leeds when he failed to score sufficiently high marks in an English test and did not provide guarantees he would only work locally.


A few weeks later he joined a list of the NHS in Cornwall, which had less stringent rules on proof of language skills and did not demand doctors committed themselves working in the area.


Instructions have been issued to primary care trusts since then to ensure they check doctors rigorously, but the government intends to set up clinical commissioning groups, each with a "responsible officer" legally bound to check doctors' credentials and abilities.


The GMC struck Ubani off the medical register in 2010.


Health minister Dan Poulter said patients "should be able to understand and be understood by their doctor if we are to give them the best care they deserve".






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via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/24/european-nhs-doctors-language-checks
05:50

Information commissioner clashes with Gove over public's right to know details of groups who applied to join free schools programme


The information commissioner Christopher Graham and Michael Gove have clashed over the public's right to know the names, places and religious affiliation, if any, of all the groups who have applied to join the government's controversial free schools programme.


The education secretary appeared to suggest that Graham was effectively helping opponents of the taxpayer-funded schools independent of local authorities to intimidate applicants, prompting Graham to retort that the arguments of Gove's department in resisting public disclosure "clearly failed to convince".


The steely exchange came as Gove reluctantly released details of 517 applications made for the first three waves of free schools after losing a tribunal ruling last month. Announcing he would no longer challenge the commissioner's decision, Gove claimed parents and teachers involved in trying to join the government's programme had been vilified by opponents and even lost their jobs even without full details of applications.


His department had until now fought against rulings by Graham on applications from the British Humanist Association and appealed to a tribunal on the issue "because we wanted to protect public-spirited volunteers from intimidation".


He said ministers had heard of instances where existing teachers had been hounded out of their existing schools by supporting an application and one proposer had told them of a death threat. Gove's claims came as he decided not to appeal any further against demands from the for lists of applicants.


Gove said his programme helped people "who want something better for their children and community". He ended his hostile concession by saying: "I would defend, to the death, the right of anyone to oppose government policy. I do not believe however that it is right to facilitate the targeted intimidation of brave people acting on noble motives."


Graham wrote back: "While I note your strongly held views, strongly expressed, I will only observe that both the commissioner and the tribunal have taken careful account of all relevant factors in arriving at a balanced judgment as to where the public interest lies. Your department's arguments clearly failed to convince. I note that you chose not to exercise your right of further appeal to the upper tribunal."


Graham added that he did "not for a moment" accept that publication facilitated intimidation. "I will join you in defending the right of anyone to oppose (or support) government policy. But I will also defend the operation of the Freedom of Information Act in the public interest."


Graham's office recently put Gove's department on a special monitoring list because it was among public organisations dragging its heels in responding to Freedom of Information requests.


Richy Thompson, faith schools campaigner of the BHA, said: " We believe that the previous lack of transparency in this area represented a democratic deficit, with the public being unable to know who was applying to set up schools with state funds until after those schools have already been backed by the government to open. Hopefully that should now change."






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via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2013/feb/20/michael-gove-clash-free-schools
05:20

Irish government says raw material imported from Poland had up to 20% horse DNA


Polish suppliers were responsible for the horsemeat in beefburgers scandal which hit supermarkets including Tesco, the Irish government has revealed.


Tests in recent days showed raw material imported by an Irish processing plant from Poland had up to 20% equine DNA. Products made for Tesco, Aldi, Lidl and Iceland were implicated in the initial scare earlier this month caused by food standards checks late last year.


Other UK chains withdrew products made at Silvercrest, County Monaghan, and Dalepak Hambleton in north Yorkshire, both owned by the Irish-based ABP Food Group. Burger King also stopped using burgers made at Silvercrest, which suspended production more than a week ago and is now being deep cleaned.


Well over 10m beefburgers are thought to have been removed from sale because of the scare, although authorities in the UK and Ireland have repeatedly said they posed no threat to human health.


Michael Coveney, the Irish food and agriculture minister, said he was sure Poland was the source of the contamination. "Significant quantities" of horse DNA had been found in three burgers and the imported ingredient during more than 140 tests on primary products and ingredients. Samples of Irish ingredients had tested negative. There was no evidence Silvercrest deliberately used horsemeat in its production, said Coveney. It had also said it would now use only Irish and UK suppliers.


Tesco withdrew all products supplied by Silvercrest when a survey of beefburgers by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland (FSAI) showed 29% horse DNA relative to beef content in one of the samples.


It said in a statement quoted in Irish media that the source of horse DNA identified by the Irish government correlated with the results of its own investigations at the plant. It would give detailed consideration to all the findings, it said. The supermarket, which apologised to customers after the original contamination, had to apologise again last week when burgers that were supposed to be off the shelves were found still on sale in one of its Oxford branches.


Tests at the Dalepak plant near Northallerton for the UK's Food Standards Agency last week found no traces of either horse or pork DNA, found in the initial FSAI sampling. Waitrose, among the companies with burger lines made there, has already decided to restock its shelves. Dalepak never suspended production during the scare.


ABP, which also has a food plant in Poznan, Poland, said this was not the source of the contaminated meat and none of its plants processed horsemeat. It said there would be new management at Silvercrest and the company had already started a new DNA testing regime for contamination by equine and other sources in addition to legal food safety requirements.






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via The Guardian World News http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jan/27/horsemeat-burgers-traced-polish-suppliers
03:37
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