Professor Alan Reilly:

Yes. The Minister has answered most of the questions, but the one I will address is when we realised we had a problem. I realised we had a serious problem late in the evening on Friday, 11 January. We had received the results from IdentiGEN and I went home and had a very uncomfortable weekend thinking about what we would do. We had started the work of taking samples and so on in the middle of November. When we had received initial results, I was saying there had to be something wrong; that this could not be happening. We were finding it difficult to believe we had horsemeat in burgers. We tested, took more samples, retested, went to another laboratory to confirm the results and so on. We went at it hammer and tongs with respect to the science because we had to be sure. If we had come out with a half-cocked story about horsemeat in the meat industry on the market, we would have been crucified. I would be sitting here today and members would be asking me the reason I had come out with such a half-cocked story, why I had not verified the results and so on.

It took us a long time to really get to the nub of the problem and to be sure that what we were going to announce was fact. That one burger containing 29% equine DNA was the one result we could not explain. We could explain everything else. When we looked at these imported products from the Netherlands and Spain we used a test that is based on mitochondrial DNA. Essentially, one is looking at between ten and 100 cells. That is the type of sensitivity we are talking about. This is about 10,000 times more sensitive than the nuclear DNA on which we base the quantitative results. We were looking at trace amounts and trying to explain those trace amounts. In the trace amounts we were seeing in the Dutch and Spanish burgers there was no commercial gain to anybody in adding that quantity of equine meat to a product. The most reasonable explanation was commercial cross-contamination; during processing, maybe something just got in by accident. We informed our colleagues in the Netherlands and Spain of that contamination. That was a very reasonable thing to do. We did not quite know at the time that this was not significant so we had to build everything in. As we were looking for the source of equine DNA in meat products, we could not rule anything out and we could not rule anything in. To answer the question, when we realised we had a serious problem we informed the Minister's Department and the Department of Health on the Monday. Again, much evaluation took place over that weekend in order to be sure that what we were going to announce was correct. We had been working on it for almost three weeks. Certainly the testing we did has been proven time and again. In the UK, the Co-op found 17.1% equine DNA in one of its burgers. The Minister has gone through all the positive tests. It was not just a fluke that we found that 29%. We were correct to do what we did and I stand over that.

With respect to the relative amounts of DNA and how it is expressed, we are talking about 29% equine DNA relative to beef DNA. The Minister's explanation is correct; that is exactly how it is. Crudely, one could say we are essentially talking about horse versus beef, but in scientific terms, when it comes to the real detail, it must be expressed as the percentage of equine DNA to beef DNA. That is essentially what the tests reveal. If one wants to interpret this into layman's language, we are talking about roughly 29% horse to beef.