LONDON – ABOUT 70 per cent of fresh chickens on sale in Britain are contaminated with a food poisoning bug, the Food Standards Agency says.
A six-month survey of chilled whole birds found 18 per cent also tested positive at the highest level of contamination for campylobacter, the FSA said on Thursday.
None of the major supermarkets met industry standards for reducing the bacteria, which is killed during cooking but still affects 280,000 people in Britain each year.
Most of the cases are caused by poultry and in rare instances campylobacter can cause death.
In February, the FSA began a year-long survey of retail chickens to establish the scale of the problem.
