A proposal to lift the ban on British beef for certain categories of meat from Northern Ireland is to be adopted by the European Commission tomorrow, sources said yesterday.
The proposal, which has to be approved by EU governments before being implemented, represents the first significant step towards a relaxation of the worldwide embargo on British beef.
In London, the British Government has been accused of failing to respond properly to the crisis in British food production by the professor who investigated an outbreak of E. coli in Scotland which killed 20 people.
On BBC2's Food & Drink programme to be shown tonight, Professor Hugh Pennington says the government is not pushing through his recommendations quickly enough. His comments follow the announcement by the British Medical Association yesterday that "all raw meat" in the UK should be "assumed to be contaminated with pathogenic organisms.
"The only safe approach for the food industry and the general public is to treat all raw meat as infected and adopt `universal precautions' in handling and cooking raw meat," the BMA said in a submission to the House of Commons Agriculture Committee inquiry into food safety.
The stark warning from the BMA came just two days before the publication of the Government's white paper on a new Food Standards Agency. The agency would monitor food safety following serious food scares in recent years.
In 1997 200 people died from food poisoning in the UK. The BMA says that all raw meat should be seen as a potential source of food poisoning in the aftermath of incidents of salmonella, E. Coli 0157 and campylobacter. In evidence submitted to the Agriculture Committee, the BMA stressed the need to ensure that raw meat be chilled to 5 degrees Celsius.
The Meat and Livestock Commission argued that there was "no reason" to create a scare about meat. "All fresh food is perishable and should be regarded as a possible source of contamination, and red meat is no different to any other raw food requiring cooking before eating," the commission's director, Mr Colin McClean, said.