We haven't mentioned it until today, but over the last month Hungary has been in the throes of a near-panic over reports that numerous food products sold in the country were unsafe due to trace elements of cancer-causing dioxin in the food additive called "guar gum." After concerns that tainted batches of the common but little-understood preservative/stabilizer had found their way from India into a variety of imported products, the Hungarian health authorities launched a massive campaign of testing, to make sure that all the thousands of products containing the additive were safe. Meanwhile, the scare was latched on to by some politicians, who claimed it as further proof of the evils of imported food. Happily, according to a report on tozsdeforum.hu, Hungary's chief food cop Miklós Süth says that consumers can now return to their normal program of shopping, following the government's test of 6,794 samples taken from 5,362 businesses inspected. Unfortunately, the dragnet failed to identify a local and far less exotic food safety threat that seems to be as or even more dangerous.

Unlike guar gum, which is a chain galactomannan with galactose on every other mannose unit whose Beta 1-4 Glycosidic linkages couple the mannose units and the galactose side chains through alpha 1-6, and is otherwise as mysterious as it is ubiquitous, the threat this time comes from the "pure" milk of Hungarian goats, like the cute little critter pictured above next to the scary-looking schematic for the chemical structure of guar gum. As of yesterday, 13 people had been hospitalized over in Zalaegerszeg after coming down with meningitis from drinking goat milk that had been infected with the potentially deadly neural disease, probably by a tick, and not properly pasteurized.

So the question is, will the same food safety "experts" and politicians who cried bloody murder over the guar gum scare - and netted millions of euros in mandatory testing fees - show the same concern and outrage over a purely domestic food safety crisis that has actually claimed 13 serious victims, and potentially many more? Let's just say that we're not holding our breath. On the other hand, Zalaegerszeg is suspiciously close to the Austrian border...