Canadian Burgers All Beef

I wonder what would happen if someone here in North America - the paradise for meat burger lovers - would have a similar close look the patties.

That's how I ended a blog post in  January. I had talked about the a study which tested for the presence of horse and pig DNA in beef products such as beef burger, beef meal and salami products. It revealed the presence of horse DNA in some beef burger products. Meanwhile this case got bigger and it seems that many European Countries found horse meat in their beef products.

Reason enough for our lab at BIO to test products sold in Canada and all those among us that eat burgers every now and then were quite happy to discover that all burgers tested were 100% beef. We were able to retrieve DNA Barcodes of sufficient length from cooked burgers purchased of all the big franchises and from frozen burger patties sold at local supermarkets. 

After all the fraudulent substitution in the fisheries business I had to witness over the years of testing this is good news for a change. It is also striking that it took us not very long to do all the tests although we are looking at sometimes heavily processed meat products. That should be a signal to companies and authorities. DNA Testing should be incorporated into all company ISO quality assurance and quality control procedures so they know what they are buying from their suppliers. The food inspection authorities should jump on board and incorporate DNA technology into their control mechanisms. The US FDA and their seafood DNA Barcoding program is a very good example to follow.