The Council of Agriculture (COA), together with the Department of Health and the Environmental Protection Administration, yesterday announced new policies to crack down on the sanitation standards of agricultural and fishery products.
"The Chinese Agricultural Standards (CAS) certification has long been used in meat products, but has never been extended to fresh fish products," explained Hu Fu-Hsiung (
"Currently, we do random checks before fish are sold on the market, but we plan to begin performing tests at fishery sites between now and February, in time for the Lunar New Year," said Bret Lin (
He said that consumption of fish products usually increased during the New Year holiday.
According to the council, nine inspection sites have been established in different areas of Taiwan.
"We will set up a labeling system so that restaurants can put up a standardized logo indicating that it sells fresh fish products from CAS certified fisheries," Hu said.
The COA hopes to implement the system some time in February.
The announcement follows Japan's rejection last month of a batch of Taiwanese eels that had been contaminated by antibiotics. The EU also rejected 30 tonnes of Taiwanese shrimp and fish between August and October after detecting a residue of chloramphenicol, a carcinogenic substance, in the products.
Hu also explained that inspection regulations would be made more efficient. The period of five to 22 days currently needed for meat inspection results to be prepared is to be shortened to four or five days, preventing unsafe meat from being sold on the market before inspection results are announced. The number of cases currently being inspected will also be increased fourfold between now and February.
The COA reported that NT$20 million has been spent on purchasing inspection equipment that would bring detection sensitivity up to par with that of the EU and Japan.
"Our export products passed sanitation inspections in Taiwan but failed EU and Japanese inspections because their equipment has a higher degree of detection sensitivity. The equipment we now have is of the same quality as that of the EU and Japan," Hu said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater