Revelations that ducks contaminated with toxic chemical dioxins and a host of other chemicals may have been sold to consumers have sparked a health scare.
Authorities on Wednesday culled about 9,000 ducks that had been raised on land contaminated with steel furnace slag at a farm in Daliao Township (大寮), Kaohsiung County, after they were found to contain up to five times the recommended maximum level of dioxins, the Council of Agriculture said.
“The contaminated ducks have been destroyed,” Lee Chun-chin (李春進), a council official, told reporters.
The Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) later confirmed that the ducks also contained levels of copper, nickel, chromium, zinc, arsenic and lead that were two to 10 times the safety limit.
The farm, which covers an area of about 1 hectare and is surrounded by a barbed-wire fence, was a former landfill filled with illegally dumped steel mill slag.
The law stipulates that steel furnace slag can be used for landfill or road paving — but not on farmland.
There were fears that some contaminated ducks from the farm had been sold and eaten by consumers.
The farmer told reporters yesterday that he rented the land from a company 10 years ago, but only began raising ducks there after Typhoon Morakot hit the country in early August and that “not a single duck was sold because they were all killed” in the typhoon.
However, Huang Huan-chang (黃煥彰), an environmental activist and organizer of an environmental protection program at Tainan Community University, told reporters that the duck farm had been in operation since 2006 and provided photos as evidence.
He said he believed that dioxin-contaminated ducks had already been sold on the market.
Huang, who tipped off the government about the contaminated duck farm, said yesterday that there were six other contaminated sites in the county.
The findings prompted the EPA to launch an investigation yesterday.
The seven contaminated zones include Hongsiashan (紅蝦山), Dapingding (大坪頂) and Luotuoshan (駱駝山), which were filled with steel slag containing heavy metal compounds two times above safety limits, Huang said.
Some of the sites are still being used to grow pineapples and other crops, Huang said.
At the center of the contaminated areas is Fongshan Reservoir, which holds up to 8.7 million tonnes of water for industrial and household use in the greater Kaohsiung area. A thorough inspection will be needed to determine whether the reservoir is polluted, Huang said.
Yesterday, the EPA took pond-raised tilapia from the duck farm to determine the source of the dioxins in the area. The results will be available in a week.
Initial tests revealed that the amount of dioxins in the soil under the pond was 23.2 pico-grams per gram of fat — 11 times in excess of the EPA standard.
As the duck farm operator had not registered for a license to run the farm as stipulated in the Animal Industry Act, he could face a fine ranging from NT$30,000 to NT$150,000, the county government said.
Exposure to dioxins can affect liver function, the WHO has stated.
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