A magazine yesterday alleged that edible oil and sauce packs from instant noodles products from six companies contained residual traces of heavy metals.
The Chinese-language Business Today magazine said it tested the oil packs following comments made by edible oil businesspeople that “the oil packs in instant noodles have even greater problems” amid the recent edible oil scandal.
At the end of last month, the magazine purchased instant noodles from supermarkets and hypermarkets around Taipei and sent the oil packs they contained to SGS Taiwan for laboratory testing.
Of the seven products sent for testing, the sauce packs from a chicken noodle soup and a beef noodle soup product made by Vedan contained minute traces of copper, a sauce pack from the Wu Mu brand contained traces of arsenic and copper, and a spicy beef noodle product’s sauce pack from Master Kong, a sauce pack from a Shin Ramyun product, and a pickled cabbage and beef noodle soup product’s sauce pack from Uni President’s were found to contain traces of arsenic, copper and lead.
A rice noodle product from A-she brand had also been found to contain the aforementioned heavy metals and also traces of mercury, the magazine said.
The report also included an interview with the Consumers’ Foundation’s editor committee, which said that though it was inevitable that residues of the more toxic heavy metals would appear in foodstuffs, once the amount of residues exceeded the human body’s level of tolerance they would disrupt the normal biological functions.
An unnamed committee member interviewed by the magazine also said that as there were no standards for heavy metal residues in sauce packs for instant noodles in the country, it was impossible to tell whether or not the residual amounts in the sauce packs exceeded human tolerance levels.
In response, the brands named in the report said that the residues of heavy metals found in the sauces packs were common in the environment and in other foodstuffs, adding that as the sauces were made from plants, fruit and natural oils, the residual amounts were well within legal standards and there was no reason for consumers to be concerned about the report.
The brands also said that as the government had not set a legal limit on the levels of trace metals in the products, the discovery of the metals had no legal ramifications.
Considering that most countries issue more than five denominations of banknotes, the central bank has decided to redesign all five denominations, the bank said as it prepares for the first major overhaul of the banknotes in more than 24 years. Central bank Governor Yang Chin-lung (楊金龍) is expected to report to the Legislative Yuan today on the bank’s operations and the redesign’s progress. The bank in a report sent to the legislature ahead of today’s meeting said it had commissioned a survey on the public’s preferences. Survey results showed that NT$100 and NT$1,000 banknotes are the most commonly used, while NT$200 and NT$2,000
The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) yesterday reported the first case of a new COVID-19 subvariant — BA.3.2 — in a 10-year-old Singaporean girl who had a fever upon arrival in Taiwan and tested positive for the disease. The girl left Taiwan on March 20 and the case did not have a direct impact on the local community, it said. The WHO added the BA.3.2 strain to its list of Variants Under Monitoring in December last year, but this was the first imported case of the COVID-19 variant in Taiwan, CDC Deputy Director-General Lin Ming-cheng (林明誠) said. The girl arrived in Taiwan on
South Korea is planning to revise its controversial electronic arrival card, a step Taiwanese officials said prompted them to hold off on planned retaliatory measures, a South Korean media report said yesterday. A Yonhap News Agency report said that the South Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs is planning to remove the “previous departure place” and “next destination” fields from its e-arrival card system. The plan, reached after interagency consultations, is under review and aims to simplify entry procedures and align the electronic form with the paper version, a South Korean ministry official said. The fields — which appeared only on the electronic form
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) is suspending retaliation measures against South Korea that were set to take effect tomorrow, after Seoul said it is updating its e-arrival system, MOFA said today. The measures were to be a new round of retaliation after Taiwan on March 1 changed South Korea's designation on government-issued alien resident certificates held by South Korean nationals to "South Korea” from the "Republic of Korea," the country’s official name. The move came after months of protests to Seoul over its listing of Taiwan as "China (Taiwan)" in dropdown menus on its new online immigration entry system. MOFA last week
RSS