Tag Archives: China

Nothin’ new here: China reports 500,000 food safety violations in 9 months

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The Bangkok Post reports China, rocked in recent years by a series of food safety scandals, uncovered as many as half a million illegal food safety violations in the first three quarters of the year, an official has told lawmakers.

Chinese officials have unearthed a series of recent scandals, including rice contaminated with heavy metals, the use of recycled “gutter oil” in restaurants, as well as the sale of baby formula containing lethal amounts of the industrial chemical melamine in 2008.

Bi Jingquan, the head of the China Food and Drug Administration, told the Standing Committee of National People’s Congress on Friday that while significant progress had been made in the food sector, “deep-seated” problems remained.

Thanksgiving leftovers? Ship them to Shanghai

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Liu Renzhi of CCTV reports that authorities and some restaurants in Shanghai’s Putuo District have set up shared refrigerators in various public spaces. The refrigerators look to serve the disabled and elderly in getting free leftovers. The initiative also aims to reduce the amount of waste at restaurants.

sorenne-tedMr. Wang got some free cake from a community refrigerator this morning in Changshou compound. He says it’s convenient.

“I like this idea. I can’t walk normally due to a stroke. Now I don’t have to go far for food or spend too much thanks to the community refrigerator,” he said.

“The locals come as soon as we open at 8:30 am. Most of them are in their 70s or 80s,” said Peng Hongjun, volunteer, New Puxiong Community in Putuo District.

Suppliers put about 30 boxes of food in the refrigerator every time. They include half-cooked dishes, milk and cake. And more food is added in the afternoon. There’s no limit of how much food one person can get. The food is often all gone within ten minutes of the refrigerator opening in the morning.

thanksgiving-leftoversWang said they’re working with food safety authorities to ensure the hygiene and quality of the food. Volunteers also write down the names and contacts of those who take food in case there are any food safety issues.

Food fraud is a reoccuring problem; expired milk powder resold

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Substituting for cheaper, or expired inputs, or adding supplemental ingredients isn’t new in the food world. As long as there have been food, there has been food fraud.

Melamine in dog food, horse meat in beef lasagne or seagull meat mixed with other protein sources have all garnered attention and research. Food manufacturers in China, a huge and still growing food export market, have been fingered in multiple fraud cases. The latest incident, according to Stuff, centers around reselling expired milk powder.

Chinese police on Monday (NZT) arrested 19 people in Shanghai for selling about 300 tonnes of expired Fonterra milk powder, Shanghai Daily reported.

The suspects were allegedly managing a company, which was packaging expired products of the New Zealand dairy company – one of the most popular brands in China – into smaller packages for resale below market prices, according to media reports.

After a months-long investigation, the police discovered that one of the suspects sold the expired products to another company, who in turn allegedly resold almost 200 tonnes to distributors in Shanghai and in the Jiangsu, Henan and Qinghai provinces, who sold them on e-commerce platforms or in wholesale.

The authorities have seized 100 tonnes of these products and have shut down the websites selling them.

Fonterra spokeswoman Maree Wilson said on Monday night it supported the enforcement steps taken by Chinese officials.

“The Chinese authorities have acted strongly and swiftly to investigate and arrest the people they believe are responsible for this and we fully support their actions.
“Food safety is our top priority and we are committed to providing safe and high quality dairy products.

“We work actively with our direct customers to ensure the integrity of our products. This includes providing guidelines on how to manage expired product in a responsible way.

“In this case there appears to have been criminal activity much further along the supply chain.

“While we believe this is an isolated criminal incident, we are reviewing the case internally.”

Wilson said that, to Fonterra’s knowledge, the milk powder was not being resold with Fonterra packaging.

 

Norovirus outbreak sickens dozens linked to ‘party place’ in Hong Kong

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Something was lost in translation, so I asked my friend from China, what’s a party place?

She told me it was a gathering spot that can cater to large events — 2-3,000 people — and called it an infection centre.
stephen_colbert_asian_friendAn ideal place to circulate Norovirus.

Health officials with Centre for Health Protection (CHP) of the Department of Health (DH) announced the investigation of a norovirus outbreak that has sickened at least two dozen in a party place in Sham Shui Po.

The 24 patients, including 13 children (six boys and seven girls) and 11 adults (three men and eight women) aged from 1 to 39, have presented with fever, vomiting and diarrhea since October 1. Among them, 18 sought medical attention while five of them have been discharged after hospitalization. All patients are now in a stable condition.

The stool specimen of one child tested positive for norovirus upon laboratory testing by the hospital concerned. Investigations are continuing.

In addition, health officials are investigating two outbreaks of acute gastroenteritis (AGE) in two kindergartens in Tai Po and Tin Shui Wai. An etiology has not been determined.

The outbreak at the kindergarten in Tai Po involves eight males and 13 females, comprising 18 pupils aged 3 to 5 and three staff members. They have presented with vomiting, diarrhea and fever since September 29. Fourteen of them sought medical attention and none required hospitalization.

The outbreak at the kindergarten in Tin Shui Wai involved eight boys and 13 girls aged between 2 and 5. They have presented with diarrhea and vomiting since October 3. Eleven pupils sought medical attention while one of them required hospitalization.

All three facilities have been visited by health officials and received advice concerning  proper and thorough disinfection, disposal of vomitus, and personal and environmental hygiene. The three places have been put under medical surveillance.

Check if there’s paper towels in the kids’ bathrooms: Evidence-based interventions of Norovirus outbreaks in China

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In resource-limited settings where laboratory capacity is limited and response strategy is non-specific, delayed or inappropriate intervention against outbreaks of Norovirus (NoV) are common. Here we report interventions of two norovirus outbreaks, which highlight the importance of evidence-based modeling and assessment to identify infection sources and formulate effective response strategies.

norovirus-bathroomMethods

Spatiotemporal scanning, mathematical and random walk modeling predicted the modes of transmission in the two incidents, which were supported by laboratory results and intervention outcomes.

Results

Simulation results indicated that contaminated water was 14 to 500 fold more infectious than infected individuals. Asymptomatic individuals were not effective transmitters. School closure for up to a week still could not contain the outbreak unless the duration was extended to 10 or more days. The total attack rates (TARs) for waterborne NoV outbreaks reported in China (n = 3, median = 4.37) were significantly (p < 0.05) lower than worldwide (n = 14, median = 41.34). The low TARs are likely due to the high number of the affected population.

Conclusions

We found that school closure alone could not contain Norovirus outbreaks. Overlooked personal hygiene may serve as a hotbed for infectious disease transmission. Our results reveal that evidence-based investigations can facilitate timely interventions of Norovirus transmission.

BioMed Central Public Health

Tianmu Chen, Haogao Gu, Ross Ka-Kit Leung, Ruchun Liu, Qiuping Chen, Ying Wu and Yaman Li

DOI: 10.1186/s12889-016-3716-3

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-016-3716-3

Shanghai gets tough with lifetime bans for food-safety violators

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Shanghai has announced it will hand out new penalties to food-safety violators, with some crimes even leading to life bands from the food industry.

The move is the result of a draft review by the Standing Committee of the city’s Municipal People’s Congress of local measures on safeguarding food safety.

The draft, which contains measures to implement the national law on food safety, urged “the strictest punishment” for violators.

 

1000 tons of meat seized in South China some ‘soaked in bleach’

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Police in China’s southern province of Guangdong have seized $12.3 million of potentially hazardous frozen meat including some reportedly soaked in bleach.

goodfellas-body-meat-freezer-09Sixteen suspects were detained in the raid late last week, say local police, who uncovered 1,000 tons meat and offal — chiefly from the U.S., Brazil and Thailand — on a vessel near Dangan Island by the city of Shenzhen.

“A criminal gang that used to smuggle frozen meat products, along with marine smuggling channel in Guangdong waters, were busted in the crackdown,” said a police statement, reports the state-backed China Daily newspaper.

Police said some of the haul — including beef cuts, tripe, tongue and chicken wings — had been soaked in bleach in order to clean the meat and increase its weight. A kilogram of beef weighs more than 1.5 kg after soaking in highly toxic bleach, said police, warning that the doctored meat would have “seriously harmed people’s health.”

 

Bridesmaid chokes to death on her own vomit after excessive drinking session at Chinese wedding

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I thought it was only drummers that did that – Keith Moon, John Bonham.

bridesmaid_chokes_to_death_on_her_own_vomit_after_excessive_drinking_session_at_chinese_wedding_1_2And Bon Scott.

A night of merriment ended in tragedy when a bridesmaid choked to death on her own vomit from drinking too much.

In a series of video clips, the 28-year-old woman is seen knocking back a glass of liquor with her male friends at a wedding banquet in Wenchang city, Hainan province.

She is then seen passed out and supported by her drinking companions.

After that, she is filmed being rolled away on a hotel baggage trolley.

The final video clip shows her in the hospital with doctors fighting to save her life by pumping on her chest but to no avail.

According to Shanghaiist, a lawyer said that revelers who encouraged her to drink bear some responsibility for her death.

Excessive drinking is common in China where the ability to out-drink peers and colleagues is seen as a marketable skill.

 

Burglar takes a dump on victim’s bedroom floor, police use the poop to track him down

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When you gotta go, you gotta go.

Unfortunately for one Chinese thief, that moment came when he was in the middle of robbing a house.

panda-poopThe 39-year-old man surnamed Zhang from Henan told a Beijing court that he simply couldn’t hold it, the Beijing Times reports. Rather than try to make it to the bathroom, Zhang took a dump right beside the poor victim’s bed. Think of it as a trade?

This being the age of CSI, the critical clump of evidence turned out to be Zhang’s downfall. Beijing police extracted DNA from the poop and matched it to Zhang, who already had a criminal record, receiving a 3-year prison sentence for theft in 2008.

This time, it doesn’t look like Zhang will get off so easy. Thanks to that fateful dump, he has been charged with a whopping 286 cases of theft and 1 case of robbery over the past 4 years. It’s not clear how Beijing police managed to link Zhang to 300 odd thefts, we assume that he didn’t leave his calling card at each one.

Food fraud, China-style, on preserved meats

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Daniel Zhou of the South China Morning Post reports a Shaanxi meat factory has been fined 5,000 yuan (HK$5,850) for incorrectly labelling ingredients on its preserved meat products that contained extra injected water and food additives, a mainland newspaper reported, but the finished products passed quality tests despite an official describing the factory as the “worst” he had seen.

chinese-hunan-preserved-pork-sausageThe meat from the factory in Xian, labelled “Hunan Preserved Meat”, is softer and brighter than most similar preserved meats due to the extra water and food additives injected during the production, a former worker in the factory surnamed Zhang told the Chinese Business View.

Zhang said the director bought water injection machines and instructed workers to increase the additives, including sodium tripolyphosphate, carrageenan and starch. The additives helped preserve more water in the curing process, greatly increasing the yield.

The allegations were reported to the food and drug administration in Xian in July and officials paid a surprise visit to the factory for an unannounced inspection on July 13.

The meat factory, which lacked a proper sign on its front door, was operating in a Xian industrial zone with its door locked and when the officials arrived it took more than 10 minutes for anybody to come to the door.