A letter for withdrawal from the market sent by Lild to its professional customers (and not to consumers) revealed the mystery a month ago: pork-based products contaminated by the swine fever virus had arrived on the shelves of Lidl stores. Without the company putting signs in the branches.
This was revealed in Giulia Innocenzi’s report for the episode of Report on November 17th, from which once again all the terrible practices on farms emerged, including carcasses never removed and structures falling to pieces, in the desolate context of emergency management. African swine fever in Italy.
But what has happened since then? If last summer, swine fever entered the farms of Northern Italy for the second time, striking mainly in Piedmont and Lombardy, also due to bad practices and poor hygiene in some plants, in recent months 31 disease outbreaks were recorded in pig farms, which led to the slaughter of over one hundred thousand pigs.
Collection from supermarkets
Lidl’s communication for its private customers specifically refers to batches made on a specific farm, which is part of the Aia-Veronesi supply chainin Piedmont. Although in Lombardy the situation has appeared more out of control for a long time.
In any case, then, the withdrawal from the shelves of some products was ordered, including Sliced pork belly; Tuscan pork sausage or Luganeca pork sausage rolled.
The demolitions
As for the swine fever epidemic, on 4 December the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) made public a new scientific opinion relating to African swine fever (ASF), an epidemic of this disease is underway in Italy contagious of viral origin in wild boars in eight different Italian regions.
The five risk factors
The expert group identified and analyzed five issues. The first two concern the risk and protective factors of ASF in domestic pigs, including the density of wild boars, for the appearance, spread and persistence of ASF. Then there are the possible role of vectors (including mechanical vectors) in the epidemiology of ASF in Europe and the effectiveness of barriers to control the movements of wild boars and finally the possibility of use and immuno-contraception as a method for controlling wild populations.
Lidl’s warning
Lidl is undoubtedly, in recent times, in the eye of the storm, between images arriving from pig farms of a Lidl brand supplier, chicken breasts sold with a meat disease and investigations into the entire poultry industry which would always concern Lidl. So much so that the company decided to be wary of Being Animalsclaiming that the contents published by the association are “tendentious and suggestive, as well as tainted by malicious and very serious omissions”.
Two years after the start of the international #LidlChickenScandal campaign, Lidl Italia sends a formal letter asking to share the identification data of the farms involved in the latest investigations in order to carry out its own checks, accusing among other things the animal rights association of harm image and profits of the Lidl brand.
We talked about it here: Lidl warns È Animali which disseminates the evidence of the latest investigations that nail the supplier factory
