Five dried day lily products that were found to contain high levels of bleach have been removed from store shelves in New Taipei City (新北市), health officials said after a series of random checks on food items that are traditionally popular during the Lunar New Year holiday.
The city’s Public Health Department said that earlier this month it tested 185 food items at convenience stores, wholesale outlets and traditional markets and found that five of them contained excessive levels of sulfur dioxide.
All five were dried day lily products and have been removed from store shelves, department section chief Wang Shu-fen (王淑芬) said.
The items contained up to 17.27g of sulfur dioxide per kilogram of dried day lilies, way above the legal limit of 4g, she added.
Sulfur dioxide is commonly used to decolorize and enhance the appearance of day lilies.
Suppliers of the tainted dried day lilies will be fined between NT$30,000 (US$1,000) and NT$150,000 in accordance with the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法), Wang said.
Consumers should soak dried day lilies in warm water and then boil them for three minutes to get rid of excess sulfur dioxide, she said.
Wang also urged consumers to avoid day lilies that are too bright in color as well as salted melon seeds and pistachios that appear to be too white.
Meanwhile, a report earlier this week said that 51.7 percent of day lilies checked in Taipei between July and last month contained high levels of bleach and that some of those products were from Hualien.
The Hualien County Health Bureau said on Wednesday that 72 percent of the county’s dried day lilies passed sulfur dioxide tests in inspections conducted throughout last year.
Bureau deputy head Lin Yun-chin (林雲欽) said most of the products that failed the checks were from the same suppliers in southern Hualien and the bureau had recalled them.
Taiwan has the technology to produce dried day lilies without sulfur dioxide, Lin said, adding that agricultural agencies could provide assistance.
However, use of that technology tends to reduce the shelf life of the products, Lin 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