Valio orders recall of thousands of cartons of cooking cream

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The Finnish dairy products supplier Valio has ordered a recall of tens of thousands of cartons of cooking cream with a high dioxin content.
     
According to Valio
, the content of the poisonous chemical in the cartons exceeds the legal limit, while posing no health hazard.
      The news was first reported by the provincial newspaper Maaseudun Tulevaisuus.
      Director Annika Hurme from Valio comments that most cartons of the contaminated batch have already been sold and used.
      A batch of nearly three million cooking cream cartons, now suspected of having high dioxin contents, was manufactured early July.
      Hurme estimates that some 10,000 to 30,000 cartons of this batch are still in stores and in the consumers’ homes.
      "A consumer does not notice the difference from the taste or any other quality of the product. For example, the dioxin levels in Baltic herring are significantly higher", says Hurme.
      The products to be returned are the cartons of Valio’s 10%, 15%, and lactose-free cooking cream with a best-before date of 17.10. Valio has advised the buyers of all such cartons to return the products back to the store.
      According to Hurme, Valio occasionally orders its products to be returned, even though she does not remember that this would have happened ever before because of a high dioxin content.
      Nevertheless, the company suspects that a similar batch contaminated by dioxin might also have been sold to consumers last April.
     
Dioxin originates from guar gum, a substance used for making a liquid thicker. For Valio, guar gum is extracted from the guar bean in Switzerland, while the beans themselves are grown in India and Pakistan.
      In August, the Finnish Food Safety Authority Evira looked into the import of guar cum because of a high dioxin and pesticide content.
      Dioxin is a dangerous herbicide which can result from incineration of waste, among other sources.
      Exposure to dioxin can cause developmental abnormalities and cancer. However, no serious symptoms caused by this contaminant have been found in humans in Finland, according to Evira.
      In particular those people who consume large amounts of fish are exposed to dioxin.


Links:
  Finnish Food Safety Authority
  Valio
  Dioxin (Wikipedia)

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