The Consumers’ Foundation yesterday urged the government to tighten an import ban on Japanese food products manufactured near the ill-fated Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, on the heels of the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s recent revelation that it is mulling relaxing the ban.
Consumers’ Foundation chief inspector Ling Young-chien (凌永健), a chemistry professor at National Tsing Hua University, said that Taiwan only prohibits food imports from five Japanese prefectures — Fukushima, Ibaraki, Tochigi, Gunma and Chiba — compared with China and Macau’s ban on eight prefectures and the US’ 14.
“In addition, the nation’s safety tolerance limit for radioactive content is also much higher than that of Japan. Our government permits 370 becquerels per kilogram [Bq/kg] of cesium-134 and cesium-137 combined in food products, while Japan only allows 100Bq/kg in foodstuffs and an even lower level of 50Bq/kg in dairy products and baby formula,” Ling told a news conference in Taipei.
Given the two nations’ geographical proximity, there should not be such a large difference between their safety limits for radioactive isotopes, Ling said.
The foundation also urged the government to follow the 26 countries demanding an official place of origin and radiation detection report for Japanese food products.
The non-profit organization’s hope for a more stringent restriction on Japanese food imports might be misplaced, in light of Minister of Health and Welfare Chiang Been-huang’s (蔣丙煌) comment on March 25 that the government was considering relaxing the ban.
The foundation also called for a revision of the Pharmaceutical Affairs Act (藥事法) to increase the severity of penalties levied against manufacturers of tainted medicines, amid a growing case in which five pharmaceutical companies used magnesium carbonate and calcium carbonate intended for industrial use in their production of stomach medicines.
“The Pharmaceutical Affairs Act stipulates a maximum fine of NT$30,000 [US$958.37] and a prison term of no longer than one year for manufacturing substandard medicines, while the recently revised Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法) stipulates that producers of adulterated or tainted foodstuffs could face up to NT$200 million in fines and 10 years in prison,” Consumers’ Foundation secretary-general Lu Hsin-chang (盧信昌) 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
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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