A seventh person has died after eating cheese made by Prolactal contaminated with Listeria, Austrian authorities confirmed yesterday.

The 57-year-old man from Lower Austria died at the end of December two days after being admitted to hospital, a spokeswoman from the country’s food safety agency, AGES, told. The latest victim is the fifth Austrian fatality, with the other two being German.

The Austrian food safety watchdog said 12 people had been hospitalised since the beginning of the...

Employees from a Chinese dairy company have been taken into police custody on suspicion of selling tonnes of melamine-tainted milk powder.

Three people from the Shaanxi Jinqiao Dairy Co, in northern Shaanxi province, have been detained and accused of producing and selling toxic food, Chinese state media reported yesterday.

The police operation comes just over a year after a nationwide contamination scandal involving the lacing of milk powder with the industrial chemical killed six and s...

Unilever has recalled an estimated 10 million cans of its Slim-Fast ready-to-drink products in North America. The company said all flavours of the canned slimming beverage could be tainted with the micro-organism Bacillus cereus, as it issued a nationwide voluntary recall across both the United States and Canada.

The products are packaged in paperboard cartons and  the affected products were also sold as individual cans at certain outlets.

Unilever said it was working with the US Food a...

Consumer Reports assessed 382 chickens from 100 stores in the USA in its regular survey of chicken safety and found campylobacter in 62 per cent, salmonella in 14 per cent, and both bacteria in 14 per cent. A total of 34 per cent of birds were clean of both pathogens, which is double the figure found in 2007, but Consumer Reports did not find this cause for celebration.

The consumer watchdog called it a “modest improvement” and said the number of clean birds was still far smaller than t...

On October 31, Fairbank Farms issued a recall of 250 tons of beef on fears it could be contaminated with E.coli. A cluster of people suffering from E.coli poisoning across a number of states are thought to have eaten beef, with at least some believed to be associated with recalled produce.

Earlier this week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said that two death and 26 illnesses may be linked to the tainted Fairbanks beef. One of the deaths involved a New York adult with s...