Radioactivity standards
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Nov. 25 announced that Uni-President Enterprises Corp’s dietary supplement Yu-bei “eye and brain protection capsules” has been found to contain cesium-137 exceeding four times the legal limit.
The capsules are a health supplement for the eyes. Each bottle contains 60 capsules.
Although the product has passed tests conducted by the FDA, one of its ingredients, Extracyan — a cateco-anthocyanidins standardized extract of bilberry fruit — has been found to contain radioactive cesium-137 that produced 477 becquerels per kilogram (Bq/kg).
The ingredient was imported from France. According to EU standards, 1,200Bq/kg is perfectly safe. Likewise, it would not have been found illegal in the US. However, in Taiwan and Japan, due to their governments’ ridiculously high standards, the product cannot be sold.
The unit used to measure radioactivity is the becquerel, which is also the unit used to set the safety limits for radiation levels in food. One can convert becquerel to sievert, which is used to measure the health effects of radiation doses on the human body. Every 1,000Bq amounts to 0.013 millisievert (mSv).
Keeping the EU radioactivity limit of 1,200Bq per kilogram in mind, let us consider the health effects of taking one Yu-bei capsule per day for an entire year.
Assuming that one capsule weighs 10g, or 0.01kg, 1,200 multiplied by 365 and then multiplied by 0.01 equals 4,380Bq. This means doses of less than 0.06 sievert, and the FDA’s tests have found 477Bq/kg in Extracyan, only 0.025mSv.
What does 0.025mSv mean? Taking one flight in an airplane would result in exposure to radioactivity that is four times that amount.
Average levels of radioactivity in nature are 2mSv to 3mSv, while in Sweden the average is 5mSv to 6mSv. Exposure to radioactivity during one flight is estimated to be between 0.1mSv and 0.21mSv, while pilots are exposed to several dozen mSv per year.
In Guarapari, a famous tourist destination near Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the natural radiation levels are about 10mSv per year, but local residents love to spend time on the beach and enjoy the beautiful scenery.
Ten mSv is even higher than the radiation levels detected in the town of Iitate, Fukushima Prefecture, which was entirely evacuated following the meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in 2011.
The government’s standards for radioactivity in food are a joke, as they are not in line with international standards.
Equally laughable is the government’s ban on food products imported from areas in Japan affected by the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster.
The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries on Nov. 21 announced that Saudi Arabia had lifted a rule on Japanese food imports to the country that required Japanese exporters to provide documents showing the radiation levels of food products from Fukushima, Miyagi, Tokyo and nine other prefectures.
Those documents are now no longer required.
For how long must Taiwan remain an international laughingstock for refusing to change its standards for radioactivity in food?
Liu Chen-chien
Taipei
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not