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Your support makes all the difference.One in 10 British manufacturers producing pies, sausages and burgers, used cheap meat slurry, which carried a high risk of passing on "mad cow disease".
Before it was banned six years ago, mechanically recovered meat (MRM) was, in the early nineties, mass produced and used for food, but the identity of the affected brands is still unknown.
As the Food Standards Agency began trying to discover which MRM products derived from cattle were used in the eighties and nineties, this newspaper has learnt that research carried out in 1992 revealed that 10 per cent of all firms were still using the technique. MRM is blasted by a high-pressure hose from carcasses once the prime cuts have been taken. Scientists have long suspected a link between MRM and cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of BSE, which has so far killed 97 people.
The use of MRM was banned from use in meat products in 1995, but a survey carried out by the British Meat Manufacturers' Association in 1992 showed that one in 10 food manufacturers was using MRM from cattle.
The survey found that more than a third of firms were using the process on poultry. But the association said no fieldwork notes had survived and it was impossible to say which companies made up the 10 per cent using MRM from cattle. A spokesman said: "There was probably at a list of their responses. But they were compiled into a report so they know what the top-line figures are now but they don't have whatever data came back."
Critics of food companies have claimed they refuse to provide information about the use of MRM, claiming the information was commercially sensitive or that records no longer existed, in an attempt to frustrate investigations.
Supermarkets have also confirmed, some in evidence to the BSE inquiry, that some companies in the industry were using MRM before 1995 but said they did not know which ones. The food firms and the association insist they will co-operate with the Food Standards Agency inquiry.
Government scientists are concerned at the use of MRM because of the way it is removed from cattle bones. It includes, in some cases, the spinal cord, known to be at the highest risk of BSE infection.
It is estimated that 5,000 tons of MRM was being produced each year at the end of the eighties. Some is believed to have contained spinal cord and undoubtedly found its way into the food chain.
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