The Consumers’ Foundation yesterday named the six most important news stories of the year in merchandising, with unsafe food products, such as melamine-tainted milk products from China, topping the list.
The melamine scandal was sparked in September when contaminated milk powder produced by China’s Sanlu Group entered the Taiwanese market and was distributed to various parts of the country.
Melamine, an industrial chemical used in plastics, had been added to milk products to give a false reading on protein content. Excessive consumption of melamine can cause kidney stones or kidney failure.
PHOTO: LIU LI-JEN, TAIPEI TIMES
To address public concern, the Department of Health resorted to offering free kidney check-ups at hospitals across the country.
The foundation criticized the department, however, for its poor handling of the situation by giving it the “Very Bad Award.”
The department’s actions led to a loss of confidence in the safety of food products and must be condemned, foundation deputy secretary-general Gaston Wu (吳家誠) told a press conference in Taipei yesterday.
In the private sector, RT Mart, Fonterra and Nestle Taiwan all received the “Very Black Award” — “black” standing for black-hearted products — by the foundation for poor business practices during the melamine scandal.
A foundation’s list showed that unsafe food products included melamine-tainted milk products, rice wine laced with industrial chemicals and animal feed tainted with ractopamine.
“If consumers lack the necessary information about food products, they are vulnerable to being exposed to food products that could harm them,” Wu said.
He urged consumers to actively seek information about the products they buy to be on the safe side.
“Overall, this was a sad, depressing and helpless year for consumers,” he 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
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
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