The alert that triggered mass product recalls, a trade backlash and tarnished New Zealand's “clean green" brand has turned out to be a costly false alarm.
The Primary Industries Ministry dropped the bombshell late yesterday afternoon, moments after Fonterra publicly challenged it to confirm rumours that a new battery of tests had come back negative for Clostridium botulinum, the bacteria that causes the deadly form of food poisoning.
Ministry acting director-general Scott Gallacher said he received “clear and definitive” results late yesterday morning showing the bacteria in the whey protein concentrate was actually Clostridium sporogenes, which is not capable of producing the toxins that cause botulism.
There were no known food safety issues around this bug though it could be associated with food spoilage at raised levels, he said.
He made no apology for the ministry having moved so swiftly early this month to warn the public and trading partners of a health risk and to track and recall the product on the basis of Fonterra's test results.
“It shows that from the New Zealand Government's perspective when an issue of food safety is raised we will respond and we will respond promptly and inform the consumers and markets of any perceived safety risks,” Gallacher said.
“We needed to act on what we knew at the time and what we had been provided by Fonterra.”
Scott Gallacher
MPI
The ministry took food safety very seriously and he had immediately adopted a precautionary approach.
“We needed to act on what we knew at the time and what we had been provided by Fonterra,” Gallacher said.
It would have been a grave disservice to all parents and caregivers if anyone thought the ministry or the Government had sat on information indicating a health risk, particularly to infants.
Fonterra had engaged AgResearch to do a final batch of testing on June 26 before notifying the ministry of a potential contamination on August 2.
While it went public about the food safety risk, the ministry also sought to validate Fonterra's results by commissioning 195 independent tests from New Zealand veterinary reference laboratories and internationally respected reference laboratories.
Gallacher defended the decision not to go public when indicative results questioning the original Fonterra and AgResearch tests came in last week.
As the regulator the ministry needed to have clear and definitive results before it could go public or talk to stakeholders, including Fonterra, he said.
“I first heard late last week that some of the tests we were doing were indicating a certain direction of travel,” he said.
“But fundamentally until such time as we had a clear and definitive sense of where those test results were taking us it would have been hugely prejudicial and a huge disservice to the public and the overseas markets for us to try to second guess or predetermine or prejudice where we have landed today.”
Gallacher said he kept Government ministers updated throughout and the ministry would be stepping up oversight and testing to avoid the episode happening again.
On the back of the latest tests and a verification report out today on the scare, he hoped New Zealand had a solid platform to clear up any remaining questions with overseas regulators so it could reclaim the market access it had lost.
The various inquiries already underway would look at why both Fonterra's and AgResearch's tests were wrong, he said.
