Wed, Dec 23, 2009 page4

• AIT holds video conference on beef

  TOTALLY SAFE An official from the US Department of Agriculture denied there were health risks from US beef, saying the US had no problem with mad cow disease

  • By Shih Hsiu-chuan and Flora Wang / STAFF REPORTERS
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  The American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) yesterday held a video conference on US beef amid the controversy over Taiwan’s recent relaxation of restrictions on imports, with a US Department of Agriculture (USDA) official vowing to ensure product safety.

  Daniel Engeljohn, of the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, gave an overview of the US food safety system. Saying that the US government’s inspection process for beef production was “transparent,” Engeljohn said he could guarantee that all products were acceptable for human consumption.

  “We have a number of oversight activities over government ... we have several agencies within the government that conduct audits to see that we do what we say we are going to do ... and we have consumer advice groups to ... tell us what they expect in terms of food safety,” he said.

  

  Artist Lu Mu-jen photographs a model and a tree draped with bovine intestines and eyeballs in Kaohsiung County yesterday as an expression of protest at the government’s decision to relax restrictions on beef products from the US.

  PHOTO: HUANG CHIA-LIN, TAIPEI TIMES

  Keith Belk, a professor in the Department of Animal Sciences at Colorado State University, dismissed allegations that so-called “risky” bovine offal and ground beef were products rejected by US consumers.

  “All the US beef sold to Taiwan ... is also sold and consumed within the US by US consumers, including producers, and even my family. They are all subject to the same safety and quality standards,” Belk said.

  Engeljohn said US ground beef has a very specific identity standard.

  “Ground beef is derived from specific beef tissue. Those tissues have to be from boneless beef … any materials identified as specific risk materials will be removed in the slaughter process and they will be marked not [to] be used for human food purposes or animal feed purposes,” Engeljohn said.

  Melvin Kramer, a consultant from the EHA Consulting Group, talked about the issue from an epistemological perspective.

  “We do not have a BSE [bovine spongiform encephalopathy] problem in the US and we certainly do not have a CJD [Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human form of mad cow disease] problem in our population,” Kramer said.

  Among the three CJD cases in the US, two were long-term residents of the UK, while the third case was believed to be because of exposure from Saudi Arabia, he said.

  “When we look at the worldwide population of consumers of beef, the number of people who get CJD from beef is miniscule,” Kramer said.

  Meanwhile, the pan-blue and pan-green camps are expected to face-off next week as legislators reached a consensus yesterday to finalize a number of proposed amendments regarding imports of US beef next Tuesday. Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Wang Sing-nan (王幸男) said the party hoped the beef controversy would end as soon as possible.

  Wang said the DPP had proposed a resolution along with its proposed amendment to the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法) requiring that bones in all bone-in-beef products from the US be removed before they enter Taiwan for fear the products might be contaminated with spinal cord material during slaughter.

  The DPP recently revised its version of an amendment to the act by banning “risky beef products,” including skulls, ground beef, cow’s internal organs, eyes and spinal cord, from “areas affected by mad cow disease or areas with a history of the infection in the last 10 years.”

  Legislative plenary sessions have been brought to a standstill over the past month because of disagreements between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the DPP over the wording of the proposed amendments to address perceived flaws in the Taiwan-US protocol that allows the entry of what some lawmakers have termed “unsafe US beef products.”

  ADDITIONAL REPORTING BY JIMMY CHUANG
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