The Taipei Department of Health has found that chicken eggs distributed by a Taipei wholesaler were tainted with the insecticide fipronil and about 37,800 eggs have been recalled, officials said yesterday.
The department initiated its own ad hoc inspection of egg wholesalers, supermarkets, other retailers and school lunch providers after several cases of fipronil-tainted eggs were reported elsewhere in the nation last month.
Among 45 random egg samples from 41 farms, eggs from Cheng-kun (振崑畜牧場) farm in Tainan, sold by wholesaler Yung-chi (永吉蛋行), were found to have fipronil residue levels of 10 parts per billion (ppb), the department said.
Photo courtesy of Taipei City Government’s Department of Health
While legally there should be no trace of fipronilin eggs, the limit of quantitation — the smallest concentration of a substance that can be reliably measured by an analytical procedure — is 5 ppb, the department said.
“We have asked the wholesaler to recall all eggs from all of its batches,” the department’s Food and Drugs Division Director Wang Ming-li (王明理) said.
The tainted eggs were from a batch of 90 racks of eggs — that weighed 1,080kg and contained about 18,000 eggs — that was transported to Taipei on Monday last week and has an expiration date of Friday next week, she said.
Photo courtesy of Taipei Department of Health
Since the eggs from the batch are still within their validity date range, “we urge consumers or restaurants that have purchased eggs from this batch to inform the wholesaler to recall them,” Wang said.
As of yesterday, 189 racks of eggs — weighing 2,268kg and containing about 37,800 eggs — with expiration dates between Sept. 28 and Sept. 30, have been recalled and will be returned to Tainan to be destroyed, the department said.
Although this is the second time that eggs distributed by Yung-chi were found to have fipronil residues, the department has not fined the company, Wang said.
It did fine the firm NT$30,000 for not informing the department about the contaminated eggs, but the wholesaler did not know about the problem this time, she said.
Retailers who have purchased eggs from the wholesaler’s tainted batches should report them to the department and remove them from shelves within 48 hours, she said.
The department said that it has developed a new examination technology and has listed fipronil residue as an item that is to be regularly checked for in eggs, so restaurants are advised to purchase eggs from reliable sources and scan the product traceability QR code to access the data tracking on the eggs.
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