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.
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) on Wednesday said that a new chip manufacturing technology called “A16” is to enter production in the second half of 2026, setting up a showdown with longtime rival Intel over who can make the fastest chips. TSMC, the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of advanced computing chips and a key supplier to Nvidia and Apple, announced the news at a conference in Santa Clara, California, where TSMC executives said that makers of artificial intelligence (AI) chips will likely be the first adopters of the technology rather than a smartphone maker. Analysts said that the technologies announced on
NO RECIPROCITY: Taipei has called for cross-strait group travel to resume fully, but Beijing is only allowing people from its Fujian Province to travel to Matsu, the MAC said The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday criticized an announcement by the Chinese Ministry of Culture and Tourism that it would lift a travel ban to Taiwan only for residents of China’s Fujian Province, saying that the policy does not meet the principles of reciprocity and openness. Chinese Deputy Minister of Culture and Tourism Rao Quan (饒權) yesterday morning told a delegation of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers in a meeting in Beijing that the ministry would first allow Fujian residents to visit Lienchiang County (Matsu), adding that they would be able to travel to Taiwan proper directly once express ferry
CALL FOR DIALOGUE: The president-elect urged Beijing to engage with Taiwan’s ‘democratically elected and legitimate government’ to promote peace President-elect William Lai (賴清德) yesterday named the new heads of security and cross-strait affairs to take office after his inauguration on May 20, including National Security Council (NSC) Secretary-General Wellington Koo (顧立雄) to be the new defense minister and former Taichung mayor Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) as minister of foreign affairs. While Koo is to head the Ministry of National Defense and presidential aide Lin is to take over as minister of foreign affairs, Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) would be retained as the nation’s intelligence chief, continuing to serve as director-general of the National Security Bureau, Lai told a news conference in Taipei. Koo,
MANAGING DIFFERENCES: In a meeting days after the US president signed a massive foreign aid bill, Antony Blinken raised concerns with the Chinese president about Taiwan US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday met with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and senior Chinese officials, stressing the importance of “responsibly managing” the differences between the US and China as the two sides butt heads over a number of contentious bilateral, regional and global issues, including Taiwan and the South China Sea. Talks between the two sides have increased over the past few months, even as differences have grown. Blinken said he raised concerns with Xi about Taiwan and the South China Sea, along with China’s support for Russia and its invasion of Ukraine, as well as other issues