The majority of supermarket chicken is infected with the deadly food poisoning bug Campylobacter

The majority of supermarket chicken sold in the UK carries the deadly food poisoning bug campylobacter, according to the government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA).

It published a new retail survey which tested samples of raw chicken bought at all the leading UK supermarkets and at butchers in the spring of this year.

The results showed that 59% of birds carried the potentially deadly bacteria, and 16% were heavily contaminated.

More than two-fifths of retail chickens fell into the medium or heavily contaminated categories.

The FSA has initially announced its intention to name and shame individual retailers and processors for their contamination counts when it published its results but bowed down to pressure from corporate lobbyists from the food industry and other government departments.

It said that it will instead wait for a larger number of results before going ahead.

Campylobacter is the most common form of food poisoning in the UK. An estimated 280,000 people a year are made ill by it, and the majority of infections are caused by contaminated chicken.

Commenting on the findings, Catherine Brown, chief executive of the FSA, said: “This survey is an important part of the work we are doing to tackle campylobacter. It will help us measure the impact of interventions introduced by producers, processors, and retailers to reduce contamination.” The FSA would release information on the retailers with the worst rates of contamination “as soon as we have enough date to robustly compare levels.”

 Akashic Times is the UK’s only online, fully independent not-for-profit newspaper that brings you real news from across the globe.

If you want to keep ahead of what is really going on in the world, subscribe to our newspaper via the subscribe button and join our Facebook & Twitter pages. Subscription is completely free ofcourse