The Food and Drug Administration has not tried to cover up the discovery of a duck contaminated with an excessive level of dioxins, Deputy Director-General Chiang Yu-mei (姜郁美) said yesterday.
Local media yesterday reported that one of 21 samples of duck meat examined by the agency in July as part of a random inspection was found to have dioxin levels at 15 picograms of the WHO’s toxicity equivalent per gram of fat (pg WHO-TEQ/g), about 8.5 times the nation’s maximum permissible level for poultry of 1.75pg WHO-TEQ/g.
The findings have yet to be officially made public by the agency, but were reportedly released by FDA Northern Center for Regional Administration director Feng Jun-lan (馮潤蘭) at a press conference at the Executive Yuan on Tuesday.
In an interview yesterday with the Central News Agency (CNA), Chiang said the discovery was made during an inspection of duck meat and duck eggs carried out by local health departments.
“Only one sample was found to have excessive levels of dioxin and the rest were normal... The Council of Agriculture has imposed mobile control measures on eight duck farms, and the Environmental Protection Administration is searching for the source of the [dioxin] contamination,” CNA quoted Chiang as saying.
As for the delay in releasing the findings, Chiang said: “We could not terrify the nation’s 1 million ducks just because of one.”
Chiang yesterday declined to answer reporters’ questions about the tests, saying only that information would be made public at a press conference on Monday.
Linkou Chang Gung Memorial Hospital toxicologist Yen Tsung-hai (顏宗海) said the WHO has proven that dioxin is a cancer-linked hazard to humans, and nearly 90 percent of human exposure to dioxins is via food.
“Short-term excessive exposure to the chemical compounds could lead to skin disease and impaired liver functions, while long-term contact with small amounts of the substance could affect the immune and endocrine systems and increase pregnant women’s risk of miscarriage and fetal abnormalities,” Yen 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:
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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