Three-quarters of fresh chickens on sale in supermarkets and butchers are contaminated with the potentially lethal food poisoning bug campylobacter, according to the latest results of food safety tests by the Food Standards Agency.

The worst contamination rates were found in Asda, where eight in 10 birds tested positive for the bug and nearly a third of fresh whole chickens were heavily contaminated.

But none of the major supermarkets met targets for reducing campylobacter and Tesco, where 68% of chickens tested positive, was the only retailer with results for heavy contamination below the industry average at 12%.
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The consumer watchdog Which? condemned the industry for failing to tackle the problem. Its executive director Richard Lloyd said: “It’s unacceptable that we’re still seeing such high and rising levels of campylobacter in chicken. People need reassurance that supermarkets are doing everything they can to make chicken safe.”

Across all retailers nearly one in five samples were highly contaminated. Seven per cent of packaging on chickens was also contaminated, meaning the bug could be spread to other food in shopping baskets.

The results are cumulative figures from samples collected between February and November 2014 in three quarterly sets of tests.

Although the campylobacter bug is killed by thorough cooking, around 280,000 people a year in the UK are made ill by it, and it is thought that around 100 die.