Posted on 07/02/2006 5:56:57 PM PDT by Sir Gawain
FOOD experts fear that the salmonella bug which has led to the recall of a million bars of chocolate may be in as many as 30 additional products.
Fears have been raised because the mix used in the seven products that were taken off the shelves was also the base ingredient in other brands.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) said it has begun testing the extra products and has not ruled out the possibility of contamination in other kinds of sweets and chocolates.
Cadbury first detected a rare strain of salmonella in samples of its chocolate crumb - a sugar, milk and cocoa mix - in January. The company told the FSA of the contamination on June 19. The crumb, made at its Herefordshire factory, is used as the base for products made at the Cadbury factories near Birmingham and Bath.
The products affected and then withdrawn from sale included Cadbury's 250g Dairy Milk Turkish, Dairy Milk Caramel and Dairy Milk Mint bars, the Dairy Milk eight-chunk bar and the 1kg Dairy Milk bar.
The FSA said it understood that the crumb from which the salmonella-positive samples came went into a large number of Cadbury products. Tests found samples from seven brands positive for Salmonella Montevideo, and so those seven brands were recalled.
Birmingham Council's food safety team has confirmed it is testing about 30 Cadbury brands other than those recalled already that had been made from crumb stored in the silo into which the contaminated product had been put.
A spokesman for the FSA said: "There may be contamination in other Cadbury products, we have discussed it with them. They are testing all their finished products and the local authority is testing as well. If more products come up positive we will expect them to recall them too."
A Cadbury spokesman said the contaminated crumb was "only detected in the products recalled".
Cadbury said it had traced the salmonella source to a leaking waste pipe at the Herefordshire factory which had been fixed.
You know, you never hear of salmonella-contaminated salmon.
Wait.
Great britain?
Never mind...
Good to see their sanitary standards are their first priority. How does a waste pipe come in contact with their chocolate?
Not a joking matter. I was on the verge of a stroke until I realized it didn't affect MY Cadbury bars.
When you consider the common source of salmonella bacilli that cause poisoning in the vast majority of human poisoning cases, ewwwwwwwww. Just what was the base ingredient...?
I'll just stick to my Hersheys - the last I heard they don't have any raw sewage running in the streets there.
A bunch of Nabisco stuff now comes from Eastern Europe. I don't mind this source as much as I do South America.
I sure don't want to eat any cereal that a european has touched. I doubt if they even have flush toilets yet in some of those eastern bloc countries.
Happy Screen Name to You!
Yikes, this Cadbury news comes on the heels of the M&M's factory being closed down here in the US because of a fruit fly infestation and rat feces being found.
I eat M&Ms almost every day and was inconsolable when I heard this on the news. My store was out of them for several weeks, then got a new shipment, which I hope means everything's A-OK now. Luckily, I don't have anything Cadbury in my possession. At the moment.
Not so fast.
A couple of months ago, I got really really sick from eating MY Cadbury bar of the Fruit & Nut variety. FRiends don't let FRiends eat Cadbury chocolate.
One CANNOT count on grocery stores to pull any products, especially if a food hasn't been PROVEN contaminated. It's simply against the profit model.
IMO it came from the imported basic ingredient in the candy bars.
Leni
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