The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) yesterday said all food importers have registered with its new food importer registration platform, adding that it would use the platform to communicate important information with the firms to efficiently monitor food safety.
Due to a number of food scandals that have erupted over the past few years, the FDA established the platform this year and ordered all food companies to register.
The Ministry of Health and Welfare on Sept. 18 announced that all food importers would be required to complete their registration before Dec. 31, otherwise, without a registration number, they would be unable to have goods declared and examined.
The FDA yesterday said that the registration rate as of Dec. 1 had reached 100 percent — all 10,227 food importers had completed registration.
FDA Division of Food Safety official Cheng Wei-chih (鄭維智) said the firms were mostly based in Taipei (33.85 percent), New Taipei City (15.9 percent) and Kaohsiung (15.83 percent), and that the top three types of food products being imported are seafood (16.6 percent), coffee and tea (for a combined 7.89 percent).
“Using the platform, we will be able to communicate information to these companies in a very fast and efficient way. This is a big change in food management,” Cheng said, adding that, while in the past it usually took about a week for companies to receive notifications, now it would only take a few minutes through e-mail.
However, as the platform’s management efficiency relies on the companies providing true information, firms found to have provided false information could face a fine of between NT$30,000 and NT$3 million (US$908 and US$90,780) for violations of the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法), Cheng 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
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
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