The Council of Agriculture (COA) decided yesterday to investigate possible melamine contamination in the aquaculture industry, after a fake protein additive was found in a brand of locally produced fish food.
Fisheries Agency Director General James Sha (沙志一) said his agency would identify all the fish farms that have used the contaminated food in the next few days and then test their fish for melamine residue.
The contaminated fish food made by a Pingtung County-based manufacturer was made for feeding groupers, milkfish and Japanese seaperches.
The agency uncovered the problem during its latest regular inspection of fish food. Melamine, which had not been a target in tests, was included after the chemical was found in squid viscera meal from South Korea intended as a fish food ingredient last week.
Sha said a preliminary investigation linked the contamination in Taiwan to South Korea.
Sha said the contaminated fish food was processed from a batch of squid meal that had been imported from South Korea last month.
Of the 36,000kg of squid meal imported by the Taiwanese manufacturer, 30,750kg were used to produce a total of 200,000kg of fish food and more than 170,000kg of the fishmeal had been sold to local fish farms.
The agency seized the manufacturer’s inventory of contaminated feed and has ordered a recall of the sold products.
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
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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