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THE British government may have given the wrong advice to people worried about chemical contamination of crops or animal feed. This startling admission appears in a patent application filed by the former Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

In the MAFF patent, four government researchers outline a system for analysing the real and perceived health risks from crops and animal feed contaminated with industrial chemicals, pesticides or drugs. The computerised system is designed to fix flaws in the department’s previous way of dealing with such queries from the agriculture and food industries.

The old system relied heavily on individual officials’…

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