The European Commission has proposed increased DNA testing of meat products to assess the scale of a scandal involving horsemeat sold as beef, which has shocked the public and raised concern over the continent’s food supply chains.

“The tests will be on DNA in meat products in all member states,” European Union Health Commissioner Tonio Borg told reporters after a ministerial meeting in Brussels to discuss the affair.

The initial one-month testing plan would include premises handling horsemeat to check whether potentially harmful equine medicine residues have entered the food chain, Dr Borg said, with the first results expected by mid-April.

The scandal erupted when tests carried out in Ireland revealed that meat in products labelled as beef was in fact up to 100 per cent horsemeat. Operators in at least eight EU countries have since been dragged into the affair, raising fears of a pan-European labelling fraud.

At the urging of ministers, Dr Borg said the Commission would accelerate work on potential changes to EU labelling rules that would force companies to state the country of origin on processed meat products.

EU and national authorities are still trying to uncover the source of the suspected horsemeat fraud.

“All those countries through which this meat product has passed of course are under suspicion,” Dr Borg told a news briefing earlier yesterday. “By the countries, I mean the companies in those countries that dealt with this meat product.”