Food safety officials and experts attending a Taipei conference on the scandal over contaminated food products from China yesterday concluded that 2.5 parts per million (ppm) should become the international consensus as the “action level” of melamine contamination.
Foods containing melamine at levels below 2.5ppm are safe for human consumption, but foods found to contain more than 2.5ppm of melamine showed poor company practice and health authorities should take regulatory action, such as pulling products from shelves to ensure that the product is not consumed.
The Department of Health (DOH) failed to comment yesterday on what actions, if any, it would take in response to the consensus reached at the conference.
The DOH raised the acceptable level for melamine content in food to 2.5ppm on Sept. 24 during the height of the tainted-food scare. The revision caused alarm among consumers, who wanted a “zero content” standard. Then-DOH minister Lin Fang-yue (林芳郁) resigned a day after the announcement.
The conference also concluded that “no allowable level of melamine will be tolerated,” meaning that melamine-tainted foods would not be tolerated in international trade. However, the conference said that it should be determined when the presence is merely at “background levels” (and therefore safe for consumption) or whether companies were purposely adding melamine to falsely register foods as having a high protein content.
The consensus was reached among domestic and foreign experts from Belgium, Australia, New Zealand and France during the second and last day of the International Experts Conference on Control of Melamine Presence in Foods, hosted by the DOH.
The conference gathered food safety experts to discuss issues such as how to effectively control food contamination in international trade, risk assessment and analytical methodology with regard to melamine detection in foods and policy recommendations and cooperative strategies to prevent melamine-adulterated foods in international trade.
“Everyone who reads the [melamine test] report wants to think that [the result] is only one number, but it’s actually a range of numbers … For example, we can be 95 percent confident that the level of melamine is somewhere between 0.75 to 1.25 [ppm], instead of just 1 [ppm],” said Bill Jolly, deputy director of New Zealand’s Food Safety Authority.
When asked for comment on what equipment should be used in melamine testing, Emmanuelle Moons, an expert from the Federal Agency For the Safety of the Food Chain in Belgium, said that because the equipment for the liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry method is very expensive, she believed high-performance liquid chromatography would suffice.
“It’s not about one or two laboratory results, but about what you can say reliably, time after time, in an accurate fashion across all food types,” Jolly said.
He also said that some foods were more difficult to analyze for the presence of melamine, and that to have a consistent level of reporting: “We must tie it back to risk [management].”
Kang Jaw-jou (康照洲), professor of toxicology at National Taiwan University’s College of Medicine, agreed with Jolly.
“A lot of people are getting lost in chasing numbers … but the numbers are meant to clarify, not control the incidence,” he said.
Experts agreed that authorities need to ensure quality controls meet the best international practice and that risk management is more important than regulatory figures.
They also said the melamine crisis was almost over and that the vast majority of the risk stayed within China.
A preclearance service to facilitate entry for people traveling to select airports in Japan would be available from Thursday next week to Feb. 25 at Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, Taoyuan International Airport Corp (TIAC) said on Tuesday. The service was first made available to Taiwanese travelers throughout the winter vacation of 2024 and during the Lunar New Year holiday. In addition to flights to the Japanese cities of Hakodate, Asahikawa, Akita, Sendai, Niigata, Okayama, Takamatsu, Kumamoto and Kagoshima, the service would be available to travelers to Kobe and Oita. The service can be accessed by passengers of 15 flight routes operated by
Alain Robert, known as the "French Spider-Man," praised Alex Honnold as exceptionally well-prepared after the US climber completed a free solo ascent of Taipei 101 yesterday. Robert said Honnold's ascent of the 508m-tall skyscraper in just more than one-and-a-half hours without using safety ropes or equipment was a remarkable achievement. "This is my life," he said in an interview conducted in French, adding that he liked the feeling of being "on the edge of danger." The 63-year-old Frenchman climbed Taipei 101 using ropes in December 2004, taking about four hours to reach the top. On a one-to-10 scale of difficulty, Robert said Taipei 101
Taiwanese and US defense groups are collaborating to introduce deployable, semi-autonomous manufacturing systems for drones and components in a boost to the nation’s supply chain resilience. Taiwan’s G-Tech Optroelectronics Corp subsidiary GTOC and the US’ Aerkomm Inc on Friday announced an agreement with fellow US-based Firestorm Lab to adopt the latter’s xCell, a technology featuring 3D printers fitted in 6.1m container units. The systems enable aerial platforms and parts to be produced in high volumes from dispersed nodes capable of rapid redeployment, to minimize the risk of enemy strikes and to meet field requirements, they said. Firestorm chief technology officer Ian Muceus said
MORE FALL: An investigation into one of Xi’s key cronies, part of a broader ‘anti-corruption’ drive, indicates that he might have a deep distrust in the military, an expert said China’s latest military purge underscores systemic risks in its shift from collective leadership to sole rule under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), and could disrupt its chain of command and military capabilities, a national security official said yesterday. If decisionmaking within the Chinese Communist Party has become “irrational” under one-man rule, the Taiwan Strait and the regional situation must be approached with extreme caution, given unforeseen risks, they added. The anonymous official made the remarks as China’s Central Military Commission Vice Chairman Zhang Youxia (張又俠) and Joint Staff Department Chief of Staff Liu Zhenli (劉振立) were reportedly being investigated for suspected “serious
RSS