For several weeks now, Taiwan has been under the shadow of a food scare, thanks to several unscrupulous companies now known to have been adding a plasticizing agent to food products for more than 20 years. Epidemiologically speaking, this is a very long period of time and the epidemic has impacted on a wide range of items, from drinks, medicines and health foods to breads, cakes, jams and ice cream. If it weren’t for the conscientiousness of one researcher, a Ms Yang, working in the Food and Drug Administration, this practice would still be going on and harming our children’s generation, too.
Most infuriatingly, even large, reputable health-food companies have been found to have these additives in their products. This suggests that quality control in the pharmaceuticals industry, including in-house laboratory tests during the manufacturing process, has been little more than a rubber stamp.
This begs the question whether anyone in the industry cares about anything other than profits. Is there no room for public health ethics behind all this? Are these companies indifferent to the raw materials and food ingredients that are being outsourced by contractors in their name, ignoring standard operating procedures in the manufacture of their own products? We have watched aghast on TV how disgusting mush is chemically transformed into visually appetizing meals. How can anyone who has seen that ever want to eat food using such unnatural ingredients or flavorings ever again?
Outsourcing certain parts of production is common for large-scale food manufacturers. We saw a comparable example during the SARS crisis in 2003, when it was found that the Taipei Municipal Hoping Hospital was outsourcing its washing to an independent off-premises laundry. It was only when the outbreak occurred that the more severe problems were identified there. It seems that, between the occasional crises, in the ordinary run of things, large-scale operations are only really concerned about maximizing profits.
They do not have food surveillance and reporting systems to routinely monitor the quality of the food or pharmaceuticals they produce, nor do they have active surveillance laboratories to detect problems. This is rather strange, considering Taiwan has many universities with food technology and pharmaceutical departments. The technology is already there, with mass spectrometers available to detect and identify micro-molecules. Do they not teach food hygiene here, or is it just that managers in these institutions have no regard for public health?
If something similar had happened in any developed country in the world, the managers would have long ago addressed the public, updating people on what action they were taking and providing information about what improvements would be made to regain public trust. It is difficult to imagine those managers making self-righteous and indignant claims that they too were victims, as some have done in Taiwan.
Victims of what, exactly? Who is it that has been profiting all these years from putting other people’s health at risk? One would think they might consider looking into whether there are other unidentified harmful substances in the products they sell. Or are they content to simply wait for another conscientious researcher in a government food laboratory somewhere to do the legwork for them? If this is the case, consumers should refuse to buy their products, until such time as these companies deign to take responsibility for public health.
It turns out that there is no compulsory active food surveillance system or operating procedure in place in Taiwan, and all the relevant mechanisms are passive. The products are selectively sent by companies for testing on their own initiative. It’s a flawed system, and recourse to the law is not really the answer: Measures should be put in place to eradicate the problem. Also, aren’t food and pharmaceutical products supposed to have ingredients clearly labeled? Since when were additives excluded from this?
Public health ethics must be a prerequisite for anyone leading a company that has anything to do with public health. Even today, weeks after the story broke, supermarkets have not put up information warning consumers which products are affected. Surely they don’t think the burden for finding the latest information lies with the public and expect consumers to double-check all food products online.
There have been calls to elevate the incident to national security level. What we really need is a two-pronged approach, improving people’s understanding of both public health ethics and science. The US legislated against the use of these plasticizers in 1997, when it was discovered that they were harmful to children, and set up national standards accordingly. Why has nothing been done about it in Taiwan? Why are the food and pharmaceutical industries here dragging their feet, ignoring the problem?
The government and companies should tackle this challenge head on. First of all, managers and professionals in the food and pharmaceutical industries should have regular annual credits on taking courses on public health. Second, they should establish an active surveillance system and management policies to monitor and check the entire process — from sourcing of materials to manufacturing. Third, the results of studies on the risks of additives in food and pharmaceuticals need to be re-examined, as do the ways products are labeled. Fourth, the health risks to children of environmental hormones in items such as toys needs to be comprehensively studied. And finally, long-term follow-up research is needed to investigate the effect on health of the most vulnerable, pregnant women and children, whose health is potentially most at risk from long-term exposure to plasticizers, the results of which can inform the eventual establishment of food and environmental safety standards and guidelines supported by scientific data.
King Chwan-chuen is a professor at National Taiwan University’s College of Public Health and an adviser to the Taiwan Association for Promoting Public Health.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs