The government announced last week new laws for the labelling of genetically modified (GM) foods.

Under the new provisions, to be enforced by environmental health officers, shops and supermarkets face fines of up to £5,000 if they fail to comply.

Restaurants and fast food chains have until 19 September before they must make known the GM content of the food they serve.

GM tomato paste and cooking oils are excluded from the provisions.The controversy raging around GM foods and the deaths following the Northumbria E coli outbreak are just the latest in a disturbingly long line of public health scares.

The government, still awaiting the findings of the BSE inquiry, has wasted no time in recognising the new threat by proposing a food standards agency.

Lawyers acting for plaintiffs and companies embroiled in food law cases welcome Prime Minister Tony Blair's initiative.

David Body, a partner with Sheffield law firm Irwin Mitchell, representing all 45 families giving evidence to the BSE inquiry conducted by Lord Phillips, says the creation of a food standards agency is a bold and necessary move.

'A lot of the debate surrounding GM foods has similarities to that of BSE.

BSE has laid a great deal of the ground in all sorts of circumstances involving food safety issues.'Margaret Murray, a partner with Wimbledon law firm Murray & Company and secretary of the 350-strong Food Law Group - an association of lawyers who practise food law or who have an interest in food law - hopes the new agency will co-ordinate the responsibilities of the Ministry of Agriculture Food and Fisheries with that of the Department of Health.

'It should,' says Ms Murray, 'bring together all the legal issues relating to food and the enforcement measures.' Lawyers working in this field have for a long time recognised the need to have as much of an understanding of the scientific facts as they do of the legal issues.

Irwin Mitchell was chosen to lead the families' legal representation because o f the work it had done with the first BSE litigation concerning the use of growth hormones for children who had pituitary hormone deficiencies in the '60s and '70s.In the face of often unknowable scientific facts, lawyers have had to adopt a broader approach to the help they can offer clients.

Without firm evidence litigation is not always a viable option.

Michael Polden, president of the Environmental Law Foundation (ELF), has been advising Arpad Pusztai, the scientist whose experiments first ignited the furore over GM foods, in his efforts to bring his concerns to the public's attention.

On 10 March Mr Polden sat behind his client when Mr Pusztai gave evidence to the House of Commons science and technology committee.

Mr Polden says: 'There were two issues to be addressed: the need to bring into the public domain information that was essential to the public, and the confidentiality between employers and scientists'.

At the heart of the controversy, suggests Mr Polden, is the public's need for information.'More and more information', Mr Polden recounts, 'was being fed into the public arena, finally the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen came round to accepting that it could not hold it back.

From a situation where nothing was allowed to be said everything is now out.' Mr Polden says his client still believes the methods for testing GM food need to be improved.

'He does not think the GM food with which he was concerned should be put on the market.

The worrying thing is that we don't know what testing methods are being used by other producers of GM foods,' adds Mr Polden.The Pusztai case is just one of 800 cases taken on by ELF since it was founded in 1992.

The Foundation offers the public a pro bono assessment of all cases which have an environmental element, a significant number of which are food scare cases.The BSE inquiry has now reached stage two, where the evidence against those most likely to feature in the final report is being tested.

Mr Body says many of those who were involved in the BSE scandal are 'ill at ease' with the publication of records which it was thought would not be available for 30 years.

'The people who wrote these are still around and are having to take the stick.' Mr Body does not wish to pre-judge the report or comment on the possibility of litigation.

All he will say is: 'The acid test in all this will lie in testing the evidence against the record.' He acknowledges that the greater use of public inquiries to get to the bottom of food scare scandals is a move in the right direction.

He also draws a comparison between the BSE and the Scott inquiries.

'Everything has been done in the same openness.'One of the most surprising things to come out of this inquiry so far has been the huge public interest in the evidence being given.

The inquiry's Internet site is one of the top ten most popular sites in the country receiving 10,000 hits a month.Peter Stevenson, the policy and legal director of Compassion in World Farming, is a solicitor who has been caught up in the campaign to improve standards in the rearing and production of meat.

He argues that there is strong evidence to link food poisoning outbreaks to factory farming techniques.

According to a 1996 government report, says Mr Stevenson, 33% of all chickens are infected with salmonella and 44% are infected with campylobacter, another harmful bacteria.

He estimates that the cost of fighting food poisoning in this country, including, NHS treatment, days off sick and local authority investigations, is in the region of between £1 billion and £3 bi llion.Mr Stevenson says: 'Factory farming is a big factor in all this.

Chickens are bred in giant aircraft-like hangars of 40,000 birds.

They never leave and are kept on a litter of wood shavings which is never changed.

This becomes increasingly contaminated with poultry manure'.Mr Stevenson argues that one of the biggest threats to food safety is the World Trade Organisation's free trade laws which prevent the EU from freely imposing bans on the import of foods.

Recent attempts to stem the flow of US cattle which have been given growth hormones ground to a halt when the WTO accepted the US argument that there was insufficient evidence to show that it injured public health.Mr Stevenson says that unless the EU can find 'overwhelming' evidence to prove its case it will fail to protect EU citizens from unsafe food imports.

He says: 'The problem is that there is no real consensus.

Different scientists are saying different things.' For lawyers it means they must chose their sources of expert evidence particularly carefully.