Poisoning response strange
Doubts about the Taipei City Department of Health’s response to the Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) food poisoning are growing. It started on March 24 on the day of the poisonings when the bureau began its investigation. When inspectors arrived at the restaurant, they did not collect food for testing. They missed their chance to secure valuable evidence. The department said that the guidelines did not require inspectors to collect food samples during an investigation’s first stage, but is this true?
Article 4 of the Food and Drug Administration’s “Key handling procedures for suspected food poisoning incidents” (疑似食品中毒事件處理要點) states that if there are divisions of sampling labor for specimens in suspected food poisoning incidents, local health departments bear responsibility for collecting food samples, as well as conducting environmental testing on cutlery, chopping boards, potable water, dishwashing water, etc.
When Taipei’s health department was taking samples, they sooner or later would have discovered that there were no food remnants left to be collected. The procedural guidelines include the collection of grain and noodle products, black wood ear mushrooms, cabbage, bean sprouts, hongxi mushrooms and pandan leaves, as well as all the restaurant’s sauces suspected of causing the poisoning.
How could the department say that current guidelines do not require inspectors to collect samples in an investigation’s first stage?
More ridiculous is that Department Commissioner Chen Yen-yuen (陳彥元) said that the Food and Drug Administration did not stipulate that the city health department has to take samples of all food items, and that central and local government specialists could discuss amending the procedural guidelines.
Does the city health department really need to take samples of all the food items in the first stage of the investigation? If this is true, then more inspectors would need to be on the case.
The problem with their excuse is that in the collection of “suspected food products,” inspectors only need to take samples from “suspected problematic ingredients” used in the affected dishes consumed by food poisoning victims. What does this tell us about Chen’s explanation? What reason is there to expand the number of inspectors on the case?
The more the city health department says, the worse off it looks.
Yu Meng-tie
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
RSS