October 30, 2013 12:00pm by David Farrar

Not a dirty pipe

The Herald reports:

An independent inquiry into Fonterra’s botulism scare has revealed a broken torch sparked the contamination scandal.

The inquiry was funded by the dairy giant and employed a panel of seven experts to discover what went wrong when tests incorrectly identified the clostridium botulinum bacteria, which can cause botulism, in whey protein concentrate (WPC80) used in infant formula worldwide.

Products were recalled from shelves across the globe in August, and the country’s international reputation as a safe and reliable exporter was questioned by key export markets.

For its report, released yesterday, the inquiry team visited eight Fonterra plants, interviewed more than 70 employees and 30 stakeholders to identify the chain of events that led to the scandal.

Plastic from a broken torch at Fonterra’s Hautapu plant in Waikato was found to be the catalyst, not a dirty pipe as claimed by Fonterra at the time. “In February 2012 … during an examination of a large dryer in operation, a torch came into contact with a part of the equipment, breaking the hard torch lens,” the report said.

“A few pieces of this plastic were not recovered and thus contaminated the WPC80.”

Staff were approved to re-filter the affected product and remove the broken pieces in May 2012, an uncommon practice which required “improvisations”.

A pipe which hadn’t been used in two years was required to do this. When investigating the source of the contamination “circumstantial evidence” suggested that a film of micro-organisms had survived cleaning processes to contaminate the whey, but the inquiry disproved this theory.

“Describing the rework process in terms of use of a ‘dirty pipe’ was uninformative and practically misleading, if not careless.”