bbc.co.uk / 1 March 2013 Last updated at 12:54 ET
Four beef products sold by Bird’s Eye, Taco Bell and catering supplier Brakes have been found to contain horse DNA, the Food Standards Agency says.
This is the third wave of test results received by the FSA, which has now received a total of 5,430 test results.
Meanwhile, new tests conducted on beef retail products revealed no new cases of horsemeat adulteration, the British Retail Consortium (BRC) has said.
This latest round of tests saw 1,797 products being examined.
The FSA has asked retailers to test beef products for the presence of more than 1% of horsemeat, with anything above that figure considered to be a sign of adulteration.
Its latest results have found that more than 99% of tests show no horse DNA at or above the level of 1%.
The affected products are Birds Eye’s Traditional Spaghetti Bolognese and Beef Lasagne – which the company took of shelves last week as a precaution; Brakes’ Spicy Beef Skewer; Taco Bell’s Ground Beef.
USDA May Approve Horse Slaughter Plant
cnbc.com / By Stephanie Strom / Published: Friday, 1 Mar 2013 | 9:23 AM ET
The United States Department of Agriculture is likely to approve a horse slaughtering plant in New Mexico in the next two months, which would allow equine meat suitable for human consumption to be produced in the United States for the first time since 2007.
The plant, in Roswell, N.M., is owned by Valley Meat Company, which sued the U.S.D.A. and its Food Safety and Inspection Service last fall over the lack of inspection services for horses going to slaughter. Horse meat cannot be processed for human consumption in the United States without inspection by the U.S.D.A., so horses destined for that purpose have been shipped to places like Mexico and Canada for slaughter.
Justin DeJong, a spokesman for the agriculture department, said that “several” companies had asked the agency to re-establish inspection of horses for slaughter. “These companies must still complete necessary technical requirements and the F.S.I.S. must complete its inspector training,” he wrote in an e-mail referring to the food inspection service.
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