Day 294 - 05 Nov 96 - Page 28


     
     1        bullet points.  But I can see how there has become common
     2        ground in the case as the case has gone on up to the point
     3        of cooking to a great degree.
     4
     5        Anyway, we are saying that the risks with minced meat and
     6        chicken products are not just inevitable risks to do with
     7        the eating of food, or even the eating of meat products,
     8        they are particularly risks associated with those kind of
     9        products, produced in that kind of system, the production
    10        diseases of animals, the slaughter house conditions, the
    11        cross-contamination that occurs in the making of the
    12        chicken products, which is accepted, that the salmonella
    13        burden goes from one percent to 25 percent in the
    14        processing factory in the chickens and the minced meat
    15        production, because of the bulking of the meat which
    16        guarantees the contamination is spread throughout all the
    17        product, and it is not on the surface.  It is ground up to
    18        be present in the interior of the product.  Hence, it makes
    19        the system in the stores that much more fragile.
    20
    21        So the point that we want to put over is that McDonald's
    22        choose to sell the type of products produced in such a way
    23        at all stages as to...  that they are the type of products
    24        that are most risky if the contamination -- they are most
    25        risky in any event as they arrive in the store, and on top
    26        of that, of course, if there is any lapse in that fragile
    27        cooking then the risk from that product is even greater,
    28        which does not apply with most food products.  Most food
    29        products do not carry a risk if they are not cooked
    30        properly.
    31
    32        Most vegetable products, most grain products, most kind of
    33        all kinds of range of products, we are talking about the
    34        most risky products that are identified with food poisoning
    35        incidents, such as chicken and minced meat.  I think that
    36        is all defamatory of the Plaintiffs and established beyond
    37        any reasonable doubt in this case.  In that the riskiness
    38        of the product is compounded and magnified because of the
    39        production methods that are being used that are inevitable
    40        to create that kind of volume and speed of supply at the
    41        cheap prices which they need.
    42
    43   MR. JUSTICE BELL:   Yes.
    44
    45   MR. MORRIS:   Right.  I think I expressed my point there.
    46
    47        So going back to showing how some of the particular
    48        production problems magnify the risk, for example, Timothy
    49        Chambers expressed concern over the widespread use of water
    50        sprays in abattoirs to clean carcasses because they merely
    51        spread bacteria around.  He said he would also be concerned
    52        about what he called health risks from any batch of tested
    53        meat containing over five million bacteria per gram.
    54
    55        And then we came on to David Walker.  David Walker
    56        explained how McKey sampled and tested supplies to McKeys,
    57        beef supplies, characterising them as satisfactory,
    58        passable and unsatisfactory.  Unsatisfactory related to
    59        beef which had a total of more than 10 million bacteria per
    60        gram and then admitted that such consignments were not in

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