Officials now have enough information for a "solid analysis" to "identify farms to making sure that products carry no risk for consumers", said the statement.
Most of the farms are in the northern state of Lower Saxony where nine out of 20 farms had carcinogenic dioxin levels higher, or much higher, than permitted, with one batch 78 times the legal limit.
The health scare all began with eggs from German farms where hens ate the tainted feed, and the news got worse when the state government in northern Schleswig-Holstein said some animal feed had been contaminated since March -nine months longer than previously thought.
As a result, 4,700 farms were shut down and thousands of hens were culled, attempting to prevent food supplies being contaminated by tainted animal feed sent to poultry and hog farms.
German authorities said earlier this week that 3,000 tonnes of feed had been contaminated, but at that stage they believed dioxin-tainted feed had been produced for only a few weeks.
This is all becauseof an additive, a fat put it animal feed to give an energy boost, was sold to 25 German feed manufacturers by Harles and Jentzsch, a farm operating north of Hamburg. The fat comprised between 2 and 10 percent of the feed mixture for poultry and pigs, meaning a maximum of 150,000 tons of feed could have been contaminated.
Dioxins are highly toxic compounds formed by burning waste and other industrial processes.
Authorities traced the origin of the feed contamination to a Schleswig-Holstein distributor of oils for animal feed production, which distributed fatty acids meant for industrial use to animal feed processors.
Eggs from some of these farms using the feed were exported to Britain and the Netherlands for
food processing, but officials have promise the eggs pose little health risk to consumers. (and we believe them, right?)
European Commission health spokesman Frederic Vincent said on Thursday that some eggs from affected
farms in Germany had been found to contain up to five times the legal EU limit for dioxin, but added that this did not pose a risk to human health.(they always say stuff like this)
"Two thirds of eggs tested have minimal amounts of dioxin and one third are at or slightly above the legal limit," a German agriculture ministry spokesman said yesterday.
Gerd Sonnleitner, head of the German Farmers' Association, told a regional newspaper that total farming losses amounted to between 40 million and 60 million euros ($51 million to $78 million) a week.
