Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed against French dairy giant Lactalis Group by families who say their children got salmonella poisoning after drinking powdered milk made by the company, an association representing victims said on Friday.
The announcement came as French Minister of the Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire said Lactalis would have to extend its product recall to all milk products at the affected production site.
“I’ve filed a lawsuit. Hundreds of other families have already filed suits across France,” the association’s president Quentin Guillemain said during a news conference.
“Several hundreds more want to file suit, and will do so in the coming days,” he added.
French officials have reported 35 cases of children getting salmonella poisoning from the contaminated milk powder, while one case has been reported in Spain and another is being investigated in Greece.
Asked about the discrepancy between the reported cases and the number of lawsuits, Guillemain said he believed that the authorities were underestimating the number of cases.
“Unfortunately, we have not been able to compare our own figures” with those of health authorities, he said, “and today I can’t tell you how many victims there are exactly.”
Guillemain estimated that “tens of millions of cans” of powdered baby milk, exported to 66 countries, might have been contaminated by the salmonella outbreak discovered in December last year at Lactalis’ site in Craon, France.
Le Maire announced the extended recall after meeting with the company’s chief executive Emmanuel Besnier, saying he had asked the company to “make an effort at more transparency.”
Besnier himself did not make a statement, as several officials have pressed him to do, given the public alarm and chaotic recall efforts so far.
Health inspectors have discovered, for example, that several retailers, including supermarkets and pharmacies, had continued to keep the affected products on their shelves despite the recall order.
Lactalis spokesman Michel Nalet on Thursday apologized once again to parents, adding that the firm was working “in perfect collaboration” with French officials to contain the outbreak.
The claim was rebuffed by Le Maire, who told French television: “If there had been perfect collaboration, I wouldn’t have had to sign an order on Dec. 9 demanding the recall of more than 600 shipments of baby milk.”
Of the 18 children hospitalized in France, all have been released and are doing fine, France’s public health agency said, while the condition of the children in Spain and Greece has not been disclosed.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
FUTURE PLANS: Although the electric vehicle market is getting more competitive, Hon Hai would stick to its goal of seizing a 5 percent share globally, Young Liu said Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), a major iPhone assembler and supplier of artificial intelligence (AI) servers powered by Nvidia Corp’s chips, yesterday said it has introduced a rotating chief executive structure as part of the company’s efforts to cultivate future leaders and to enhance corporate governance. The 50-year-old contract electronics maker reported sizable revenue of NT$6.16 trillion (US$189.67 billion) last year. Hon Hai, also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), has been under the control of one man almost since its inception. A rotating CEO system is a rarity among Taiwanese businesses. Hon Hai has given leaders of the company’s six