Dublin, Jan 17: An Irish meat processor recalled 10 million burgers on Wednesday from supermarkets across Ireland and Britain amid fears that many could contain horsemeat.
Silvercrest Foods, Ireland's second-largest processor of beef burgers, took the action after it was revealed that DNA tests of patties on sale found tiny traces of horsemeat in more than a third.
The discovery poses no danger to public health but threatens to undermine the beef business central to Ireland's rural economy.
Experts said the finding was not surprising, given that meat refrigeration units and slaughterhouses would handle multiple kinds of meat and molecular transfers were inevitable.
But investigators were surprised to find that one burger among 27 tested by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland contained 29 percent horsemeat.
Tesco, the British supermarket giant that sold the discount burger brand in question, apologised.
Tim Smith, Group Technical Director at Tesco, said there were only two ways that it could have happened.
"One of them involves illegality by suppliers or suppliers to those individual suppliers, or gross negligence, in which case we're still very keen to get to the bottom of this," he said.
Britain's Sky News reported that pig DNA was also discovered in 85 percent of the 27 burgers tested.
Silvercrest and government leaders said suspicion was focusing on a powdered beef-protein additive imported from both Spain and the Netherlands for use in padding out the most cheaply priced burgers, which contain typically 60 percent to 70 percent meat.
They declined to identify either supplier by name because investigations were continuing, and a multi-million lawsuit for damages was likely.
"You're told to look at what's on the packet and what the label says and then suddenly you discover that there's all sorts of things that aren't there, so it's a bit worrying really," one supermarket shopper in Birmingham, England, told Sky News.
Another shopper added: "It's horrible."
Health authorities stressed Ireland's policy of occasionally DNA testing food was exceptional, given that most countries do not bother checking for non-health issues in food at all.
They said such testing, if repeated worldwide, would likely find much more widespread mislabelling of meat and fish products and traces of the "wrong" meats in processed foods.
Ireland is a major meat exporter to Europe, the Middle East and Asia and beef production provides the bedrock for rural life.
It has imposed stern measures to minimise the damage from three previous food-safety scares, culling whole herds to reverse the spread of mad cow disease in the 1990s and block the arrival of foot-and-mouth disease in sheep from Britain in 2001.
In 2008, an investigation into the country's approximately 400 pig farms found surprisingly high levels of cancer-causing dioxins in pigs at about 10 farms.
Ireland recalled all of its pork products worldwide, costing the industry some 500 million euros (650 million US dollars) in lost trade.
Within a week, however, the European food safety experts concluded that the dioxin levels posed no credible risk to human health.
This time the horsemeat revelations are expected to cause much less damage to Ireland, in part because much of Europe happily consumes horsemeat as a delicacy.
In France, where some butcher's shops specialise in horse steaks best served tartare, the Irish probe merited a Gallic shrug.
"The Irish are known for their respect of the horse, and they're not used to eating horses," the French newspaper Le Figaro explained on Wednesday to its readers.
