The Taipei City Government yesterday started inspections to test the radiation level of food imported from Japan, with the city’s Department of Health focusing its efforts on major supermarkets and wholesale stores.
The department’s inspection team yesterday tested eight fresh and frozen agricultural products, as well as snacks in a supermarket at the Shin Kong Mitsukoshi Department Store in Xinyi District (信義).
Tested products included apples, corn and fish, and the radiation levels did not exceed the legal threshold of 0.2 microsieverts per hour.
Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美), the department’s Food and Drug Division chief, said the department would conduct daily inspections at supermarkets, traditional markets and wholesale stores to test the radiation levels of eight kinds of imported foodstuffs from Japan, including fresh and frozen agricultural products, dairy products, baby food, bottled water and seaweed products.
She said the city started working with the central government’s Department of Health on March 12 and tested a total of 549 food items imported from Japan. No items have been found to have a radiation level over the legal threshold.
Chuang Chi-chieh (莊智傑), head of the department store’s marketing department, said fresh and frozen agricultural products from Japan originally accounted for 70 percent of all such products in the supermarket.
The percentage has dropped to 50 percent after the nuclear crisis in Japan, he said.
Chuang declined to comment on products that are selling more slowly because of radiation fears, and said the department store has replaced some Japanese foods with local products.
The Department of Health has temporarily stopped accepting applications to import seafood, livestock and agricultural products from Japan’s Fukushima, Miyagi, Gunma, Chiba and Ibaraki prefectures.
Imports from other areas in Japan, on the other hand, will be strictly monitored by local governments for radiation.
Chiang said the city government would put the results of its daily inspections on its Web site at www.health.gov.tw so the public can monitor radiation levels in foodstuffs.
People can also call 1999 for more information.
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
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
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