Imported frozen pig kidneys from Canada have recently been found to contain residue of ractopamine, a Department of Health (DOH) official said yesterday.
Feng Jun-lan (馮潤蘭), an official responsible for food safety at the DOH, said 450kg of kidneys, imported by a Taichung City-based food company, were tested on Sept. 19 and found to contain 0.49 parts per billion (ppb) of the drug.
Ractopamine is used legally in some countries, including the US, to promote the growth of lean meat in livestock, but is banned in Taiwan.
None of the kidneys had entered the local market, Feng said.
Taiwan's largest source of offal is Canada, with 17 million tonnes imported every year, according to Feng.
Meanwhile, the Bureau of Food and Drug Analysis said yesterday it had found two more cases in which domesticated geese were found to have ingested banned feed additives, including ractopamine.
A sample taken from geese originating from Taoyuan County was found to contain 17.6 ppb of salbutamol, while a sample originating from Chiayi County contained 29.4ppb of ractopamine.
Like ractopamine, which is sold under the trade name Paylean, salbutamol is used to promote the rapid gain of lean weight in animals.
Lin Chieh-liang (林杰樑), a toxicologist at Linkuo Chang Gung Memorial Hospital, said although both salbutamol and ractopamine are both feed additives of the beta-agonist class, salbutamol is more toxic.
All beta-agonists are banned as animal feed additives in Taiwan.
The latest discoveries follow a flurry of tainted food cases.
Strawberries from California have been found to contain the residue of Fenpropathrin, an insecticide used in household bug sprays, and local hairy crabs have also been found to be tainted with nitrofuran, an antibacterial that was banned after studies found it to be carcinogenic.
"I think that these incidents represent the pangs of transition as Taiwan moves to establish a better-regulated food safety system," Lin said.
While some have questioned whether Taiwan's food safety standards have become excessively harsh, Lin said there are plenty of approved insecticides and anti-bacterials for farmers to use.
As for the government's zero-tolerance standards on beta- agonists, Lin said that the high consumption of offal in Taiwan made the use of beta-agonists more dangerous than in the US.
"If the ban is to be lifted, we must first do domestic risk assessments based on domestic levels of consumption and other risk factors," Lin said. "We cannot simply follow the US."
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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
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: