Bute found in corned beef in the UK

The UK Food Standards Agency has announced that the veterinary drug phenylbutazone, known commonly as bute, has been found in some batches of corned beef that were removed from stores when horse DNA was found in the product. The discovery was made by Asda, the company that sold the product, who immediately issued a recall notice to its customers.

The official advice is that the product should not be eaten, even though it contains very small amounts of bute, at 4 ppb. The UK's Chief Medical Officer Professor Dame Sally Davies had said earlier "'Horse meat containing phenylbutazone presents a very low risk to human health."

The news follows the announcement of a new method for measuring the amounts of bute in horse meat, based on liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry.