Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators yesterday accused the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of a cover-up, showing copies of six official reports on illegal imports of radioactive food products that were rejected by ranking agency officials.
“Since March 4, an FDA specialist surnamed Ko (柯) and his supervisor, Huang Ming-kun (黃明坤), have filed at least six reports showing that some food products may have been illegally imported from areas in Japan where they may have been exposed to radioactive contamination,” DPP Legislator Liu Chien-kuo (劉建國) told a news conference cohosted by his colleague, Yang Yao (楊曜).
“However, all those reports were rejected by higher ranking officials in the agency. This makes us wonder if the FDA is deliberately trying to cover up the problem, while putting the nation’s food safety at risk,” Liu said.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
Since the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in 2011, Taiwan has banned imports of food items from the surrounding areas, including Fukushima, Gunma, Ibaraki, Tochigi and Chiba prefectures.
According to the documents, Ko filed six reports — on March 4, 10, 16, 17 and 18 — and Huang approved them before forwarding them to higher officials.
In the reports, Ko said that a trading firm had illegally imported food items from the five prefectures, and asked that the FDA void the firm’s import license and issue a product recall.
However, the report was rejected four times by the agency’s regional administration center senior specialist, Wang Chen-yi (王貞懿), and once by the center’s deputy director, Wang Te-yuan (王德員), before it eventually reached center director Feng Jun-lan (馮潤蘭) on the sixth attempt.
While Feng approved the report, he put it aside and did not take action.
Pointing at the documents, Liu said that the supervisors even left notes and comments on the reports, such as “Where is the evidence” and “So what,” when they rejected it.
“On March 17, an official who did not sign his or her name circled the words ‘void’ and ‘destroy,’ and left a note saying that the two are ‘contradictory,’” Liu said.
“Well, the specialist was recommending that the [FDA] ‘void’ the company’s import license and ‘destroy’ products already on store shelves. I do not know what is the problem with the official who left the note,” the lawmaker said.
Moreover, after the illegal imports were exposed, it was Huang who was penalized.
“But he [Huang] was actually the one who found the problem and forwarded the report to his supervisor. What mistake did he make?” Liu asked.
FLU SEASON: Twenty-six severe cases were reported from Tuesday last week to Monday, including a seven-year-old girl diagnosed with influenza-associated encephalopathy Nearly 140,000 people sought medical assistance for diarrhea last week, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said on Tuesday. From April 7 to Saturday last week, 139,848 people sought medical help for diarrhea-related illness, a 15.7 percent increase from last week’s 120,868 reports, CDC Epidemic Intelligence Center Deputy Director Lee Chia-lin (李佳琳) said. The number of people who reported diarrhea-related illness last week was the fourth highest in the same time period over the past decade, Lee said. Over the past four weeks, 203 mass illness cases had been reported, nearly four times higher than the 54 cases documented in the same period
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:
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
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