Butcher Blamed For Fatal E.Coli Breakout

One butcher caused an outbreak of food poisoning that killed a boy in 2005, and left over 150 others ill, the chairman of a public inquiry said today.

Bridgend butcher William Tudor was jailed after admitting supplying contaminated meat to schools across south Wales in 2005.

He was jailed in September 2007, after admitting placing unsafe food on the market and failing as a proprietor of a business to protect food against the risk of contamination.

Schoolboy Mason Jones died in October 2005 after contracting the 0157 strain of the bug, Escherichia coli (E.coli).

Forty-four schools across the south Wales valleys were affected by the outbreak and 156 were made ill.

Professor Hugh Pennington the inquiry chairman, said that Tudor showed a “"ignificant disregard for food safety" that led to the cases.

He added that inspections made by environmental health officers, were made less effective by Tudor's dishonesty.

However, they had missed several vital clues to the butcher's management of food safety.

Professor Pennington, a microbiologist who also investigated an E.coli outbreak in Lanarkshire in 1996, said better food hygiene arrangements might have thrown more light on the weaknesses in John Tudor & Son's approach to hygiene and more questions about his practices.

He said: "If anything was likely to have encouraged William Tudor to get his act together on food hygiene, it would have been the direct threat of failing to secure, or losing, what was a very significant contract."

He also said the outbreak was "particularly shocking" because of the systems regulating food safety at the time, which had been reformed due to the 1996 outbreak.

Prof Pennington said the only systems which did their job in the outbreak were in control and clinical, and there had been failures everywhere else.

"We owe it to the memory of Mason Jones to learn the lessons from this outbreak and to remember them," he added.

(JM/BMcC)