Bid to export radioactive milk criticised

Press, 5 February 1987, Page 25

Bid to export radioactive milk criticised

NZPA-Reuter Bonn The West German Health Minister, Mrs Rita Suessmuth, has. • condemned a bid to export radioactive milk powder to the Third World as morally reprehensible and demanded that it be stopped.

Mrs Suessmuth said plans to export the contaminated dried milk to a developing country, reported to be Egypt, showed that some people in private enterprise and the civil service still did not have a responsible attitude to environment and health.

The Egyptian Ambassador, Muhammed El Shaffie Abdel-Hamid, called at the Environment Ministiy in Bonn to express his concern that the milk could be exported to his country. A spokesman for the Environment Minister, Mr Walter Wallmann, said the Ambassador was given an assurance that this would not happen.

The powder originated from cows that had grazed on land contami-

nated by caesium fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the Soviet Union last April. “The radioactive milk powder, which would not be approved for. use either by humans or animals in West Germany, should not be exported to the Third World,” Mrs Suessmuth. said.

Officials in the North Sea port city of Bremen blocked the export of the milk and are demanding that 100 rail waggons containing 2000 tonnes of the powder be returned to Bavaria. Radiation checks in Bremen showed the powder registered close to 6000 becquerels a kg, 10 times the accepted level for human consumption and well above the European norm of 1850 becquerels for animal feed. Bavaria, which issued an export permit for the powder as animal feed, repeated that the milk had been Sold to an export company named Lopex and was no longer its problem.