More than 1,000 German poultry farms shut in tainted egg scandal

Berlin – Germany is reeling from a scandal in which large numbers of eggs may have been tainted with poisonous industrial residue, leading to the closure of more than 1,000 farms.

A company in northern Germany sold about 3,000 tons of fatty acids contaminated with industrial residue — including dioxin — to companies making animal feed, said Holger Eichele, a spokesman for Germany’s Ministry for Agriculture and Consumer Protection.

In all, the fatty acids were delivered to 25 companies in five of Germany’s 16 states, Eichele said.

Tens of thousands of tons of feed containing the contaminated acids were then delivered to poultry farms in several German states, with a heavy concentration in Lower Saxony.

About 1,000 farms have been shut in Lower Saxony and hundreds have been shut in other states, Eichele said.

In addition, about 130,000 possibly contaminated eggs have been exported from a company in Saxony-Anhalt to a food company in Netherlands, where they were to be used in industrial food production, he said.

The company that sold the fatty acids was raided Wednesday by police, who confiscated documents but arrested no one, the state prosecutor’s office in Schleswig-Holstein told CNN.

Dioxins are a family of toxic chemicals that share a similar chemical structure and have been characterized by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as likely human carcinogens.

Tags: Berlin, Egg, Germany