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EDITORIAL: Is the DOH doing all it can?

One doesn’t have to look very hard to turn up some stomach-churning facts about the nation’s food safety standards.

Reports emerged last week that vegetables imported from Japan were actually from China. The Liberty Times (the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper) reported that Chinese product information had been covered with Japanese labels on packages of the pricey frozen vegetables, leading customers to believe they were paying high prices for high quality.

But authorities were unfazed. The Bureau of Food Sanitation said consumers shouldn’t lose sleep over mislabeled products because imports pass inspection and meet standards to enter the country.

That reassurance sounded like a bad joke when King Car Industrial Co pulled eight of its products from shelves nationwide over the weekend. Tests revealed the products — seven kinds of instant coffee and one kind of instant soup — all contained melamine. The products did not contain powdered dairy ingredients and therefore had not been targeted by the Department of Health (DOH).

King Car’s decision to have its products tested was apparently voluntary, so credit goes to the company for opening the eyes of the authorities to potential contamination in non-dairy products. The revelation that milk-free ingredients from China also contained melamine led the department to widen its testing of products from China to include those with powdered protein.

However, King Car first imported tainted non-dairy creamer from China last December, and part of the batch has already disappeared from store shelves. While there is no cause for panic — not a single instance of illness in Taiwan has been linked to melamine — there is certainly cause for concern that the situation was allowed to occur at all.

The purpose of food safety standards is to keep toxic items off our dinner plates. For that reason, assurances that customers probably didn’t consume enough melamine to immediately become sick is beside the point. Any melamine content in food is inexcusable.

Likewise, with the department standing by its decision not to recall all tainted products that have already hit stores — presumably because of the losses this would entail for struggling food companies — the public can be forgiven if it has lost confidence in food safety controls.

Chinese products have been hit by scandal after scandal in the past year, with possibly the most shocking news being that officials swept reports of the tainted milk under the carpet one week before the Beijing Olympic Games.

With a staggering 53,000 children confirmed sick from toxic milk powder and more than 12,000 still hospitalized, it is the Chinese public that is paying the distressing price of dirty deals between authorities and companies. That is a breach of trust that all of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) promises and Premier Wen Jiabao’s (溫家寶) visits to hospitals will be hard pressed to heal.

We can expect to see more heads to roll in China, but punishing a few is no substitute for overhauling a corrupt and cynical system.

In Taiwan, meanwhile, Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers have called for resignations to shoulder responsibility. But replacing officials alone will not guarantee results, especially as some melamine-tainted products may have been left on store shelves. Without overhauling systems for inspecting imported goods, the government’s message to consumers is: “Watch what you eat, because we’ve done all we have to.”
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