Data set

on its website until the evening of 7 December. Then, with evidence emerging that some Northern Ireland farms might also be affected, it advised consumers not to eat pork or pork products, such as sausages, bacon, salami and ham, labelled as being from the Irish Republic or Northern Ireland. " We do not believe there is any significant risk to UK consumers, " the statement added. Possibly because journalists read the FSAI fact file over the next day or so, coverage of the incident then changed markedly. Most dramatically, both the BBC's Ceefax and ITV Teletext, which had splashed the story at the top of their news pages, dropped it entirely. Meanwhile, several newspapers abandoned the words " poison " and " cancer " in favour of " tainted pork ". And while most journalists still failed to put the level of dioxin into comprehensible context, they focused largely on the difficulties facing customers who wished to avoid affected foods. " British shoppers were left in the dark after the FSA failed to establish a list of pork, bacon and ham products that may be tainted with cancer-causing dioxins, " said The Times. " People were given no help to identify contaminated products that may be in their fridges or freezers. Instead, the food watchdog merely reiterated its advice that even though risks to human health were very low, consumers should not eat pigmeat produced either in the Republic or in Northern Ireland. " " TESCO is to continue selling pork from Ireland in defiance of safety advice from the UK's official food watchdog, " added the Daily Mail, " The astonishing decision by the chain, which claims 30% of British food sales, left shoppers in the dark about what is safe to eat. " There were varied and contrasting responses from other supermarkets. But these reports were unaccompanied by any perspective on safety margins, normal human exposure, or the actual relevance of the dioxin levels detected in Ireland. As we saw from the furore over GM food earlier this decade, the concept of contamination can have a social impact out of all proportion to the nature, concentration and action of the contaminant. Britain has been enthusiastically building a database of its population's DNA since 995: anyone in a brush with the law has had samples taken and whatever the legal outcome, the data have been retained since 200. This …