§ Mr. BreedTo ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs what assessment she has made of the extent of genotype test errors by laboratories undertaking work for her Department in December 2001; and if she will make a statement. [29987]
§ Mr. Morley[holding answer 24 January 2002]: We announced on 14 December that DEFRA's quality control arrangements had revealed errors in the genotype results sent to the owners of five flocks participating in the national scrapie plan. The results had been provided to DEFRA by LGC, a private sector laboratory. As a precautionary measure DEFRA arranged for all of the blood samples tested so far by LGC under the national scrapie plan to be re-tested. This has involved re-testing over 4,000 samples. Although we have no had re-test results for all but 163 of those samples, the re-testing exercise is not yet complete. However, the re-testing has revealed some further errors in the original tests done by LGC. The re-testing exercise will be completed as soon as possible. All flock owners affected have been kept informed, and will be given revised results where this is necessary. DEFRA has already given corrected results to the owners of the five flocks where errors were originally 240W detected. LGC has acknowledged the failure of their systems and has taken remedial action. Following a detailed inspection, DEFRA is now satisfied with LGC's revised procedures, but we regard as serious the shortcomings which have occurred, and we will be closely monitoring LGC's future performance.