Taiwan will bar imports of cattle organs and ground beef from the US until 2022, a veterinary expert said, citing a domestic food sanitation law.
Article 11 of the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法) prohibits the import of organs or ground meat from places that have had cases of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), or variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, within the past 10 years, Animal Technology Institute Taiwan head Yang Ping-cheng (楊平政) said.
He made the remarks following a final US report confirming that no products from the carcass of a dairy cow infected with mad cow disease in April had entered the human food chain.
On April 24, the carcass of a dairy cow in California was confirmed to have BSE by the US Department of Agriculture.
Moreover, according to a US Department of Agriculture final report, released a day earlier as required by the World Organization for Animal Health, the infection was atypical BSE — one that did not result from infected cattle feed — and was an isolated case.
In compliance with a bilateral agreement on beef trade, the US is obliged to inform Taiwan of the final results of an investigation into mad cow disease.
BSE is fatal to cows and eating infected meat can cause a fatal brain disease in humans known as variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. It was the fourth BSE case in the US since 2003.
The Legislature passed amendments to the food safety act last week relaxing restrictions on imports of meat with residues of the leanness-enhancing drug ractopamine, opening the way for imports of US beef with the feed additive.
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) mention of Taiwan’s official name during a meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) on Wednesday was likely a deliberate political play, academics said. “As I see it, it was intentional,” National Chengchi University Graduate Institute of East Asian Studies professor Wang Hsin-hsien (王信賢) said of Ma’s initial use of the “Republic of China” (ROC) to refer to the wider concept of “the Chinese nation.” Ma quickly corrected himself, and his office later described his use of the two similar-sounding yet politically distinct terms as “purely a gaffe.” Given Ma was reading from a script, the supposed slipup
Former Czech Republic-based Taiwanese researcher Cheng Yu-chin (鄭宇欽) has been sentenced to seven years in prison on espionage-related charges, China’s Ministry of State Security announced yesterday. China said Cheng was a spy for Taiwan who “masqueraded as a professor” and that he was previously an assistant to former Cabinet secretary-general Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰). President-elect William Lai (賴清德) on Wednesday last week announced Cho would be his premier when Lai is inaugurated next month. Today is China’s “National Security Education Day.” The Chinese ministry yesterday released a video online showing arrests over the past 10 years of people alleged to be
THE HAWAII FACTOR: While a 1965 opinion said an attack on Hawaii would not trigger Article 5, the text of the treaty suggests the state is covered, the report says NATO could be drawn into a conflict in the Taiwan Strait if Chinese forces attacked the US mainland or Hawaii, a NATO Defense College report published on Monday says. The report, written by James Lee, an assistant research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of European and American Studies, states that under certain conditions a Taiwan contingency could trigger Article 5 of NATO, under which an attack against any member of the alliance is considered an attack against all members, necessitating a response. Article 6 of the North Atlantic Treaty specifies that an armed attack in the territory of any member in Europe,
The bodies of two individuals were recovered and three additional bodies were discovered on the Shakadang Trail (砂卡礑) in Taroko National Park, eight days after the devastating earthquake in Hualien County, search-and-rescue personnel said. The rescuers reported that they retrieved the bodies of a man and a girl, suspected to be the father and daughter from the Yu (游) family, 500m from the entrance of the trail on Wednesday. The rescue team added that despite the discovery of the two bodies on Friday last week, they had been unable to retrieve them until Wednesday due to the heavy equipment needed to lift