Day 097 - 06 Mar 95 - Page 31

     
     1   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Perhaps I could ask Mr. Rampton:  You see, "a
     2        colony" to a scientific layman like me already means a
     3        number of things.  If one has a colony of people, it is the
     4        number of people, but when the biologists talk about it,
     5        each of the 500,000 is a colony in itself, as I understood
     6        it, from an answer which was given later.
     7
     8   MR. RAMPTON:  Yes, I think that is right.
     9
    10   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  So, at the moment the five colonies of not
    11        more than 500,000, I do not understand.
    12
    13   MR. MORRIS:  I think it is because, unless Mr. Rampton wants
    14        to  -----
    15
    16   MR. RAMPTON:  I was asked a question.
    17
    18   MR. MORRIS:  OK.  I was going to explain the situation.
    19
    20   MR. RAMPTON:  My Lord, I am not certain that I know the answer
         but -----
    22
    23   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  In any event, the point here is that,
    24        whatever the terms are, one did not get above 5,000,000.
    25
    26   MR. RAMPTON:  That is right.  But that is not really the point
    27         -- whether it is five or 10,000,000 your Lordship will
    28        decide at the end of the evidence -- my problem is that I
    29        do not believe that a colony, or a total number of colonies
    30         -- I do not know which it is -- of 5,000,000 or 500,000 is
    31        or are a colony or colonies of pathogenic bacteria.
    32
    33   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  No.
    34
    35   MR. RAMPTON:  They are total numbers or colonies of bacteria.
    36        What one needs to ----
    37
    38   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  They may or may not be pathogenic, if I could
    39        just think aloud.  The higher you get above the passable
    40        figure, the more likely it may be that they become
         pathogenic.
    42
    43   MR. RAMPTON:  Also, it is a probability, I suppose, that since
    44        Salmonella is the commonest of these bacteria -- at least
    45        the one that people seem to know most about, certainly
    46        commonest in chicken -- then this is in a sense a sort of a
    47        safety net, a belt and braces, that one will have some
    48        Salmonella probably or, perhaps, amongst the colonies which
    49        one observes on any given piece of meat, but as long as it
    50        is kept round about or below 5,000,000 then one knows one 
    51        is pretty safe so far as human food is concerned, because 
    52        they are certainly are not the whole of those colonies. 
    53
    54   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  Yes.  It seems to me that what the Defendants
    55        were aiming at with paragraph 6 is not Salmonella
    56        specifically or E.coli, but numbers of unspecific
    57        bacteria.  What they say is that McKey's let through raw
    58        meat products of one kind or another which have colonies of
    59        bacteria in excess of, say, 5,000,000 and they are not
    60        aiming here at Salmonella, or E.coli 0157 H, but at sheer