Taiwan's top consumer group said it has found toxic substances like bleach, lead and hydrogen peroxide in seafood and vegetables from China.
The contaminated items were found in markets on the outlying Taiwanese island of Kinmen, near China's southern coast, the Consumer's Foundation said in a report posted on the group's Web site yesterday.
The foundation said that it sent researchers to Kinmen in June and July to collect samples of the goods. Tests on mushrooms found potentially dangerous substances like lead and the heavy metal cadmium, widely used in batteries and alloys, the group said.
The tests also found hydrogen peroxide in shark's fins, and sulfur dioxide or bleach in bamboo shoots and vegetables, the foundation said.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
‘GROWING UP TOGETHER’: Jensen Huang celebrated the nation’s role in the formation of the tech firm at a Silicon Valley gathering, saying ‘Taiwan saved Nvidia’ Taiwan is in the center of the new artificial intelligence (AI) revolution, Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) told a gathering with Taiwanese on Thursday in Silicon Valley’s largest city, San Jose. Tainan-born Huang said it must be celebrated that “Taiwan is right in the middle” of a new industrial revolution in which “something new is being made, and made in a new way.” Huang recalled the manufacturing process of the RIVA 128 graphics processing unit, Nvidia’s first commercial success, describing it as the “most complicated chip at the time.” As Nvidia did not have the budget, he wrote a letter to Taiwan