Taipei County Government health officials yesterday defended themselves against accusations of incompetence during the uproar last year over tainted cooking oil at fast food outlets.
The comments came after Banciao District Prosecutors’ Office yesterday announced it would not issue indictments to the restaurants that were found to have high levels of arsenic in their cooking oil, citing insufficient evidence.
Taipei County Government Legal Affairs Bureau Director Chen Kun-jung (陳坤榮) defended the county government, saying the inspection was done according to the rules set out by the Department of Health, which did not specify that the arsenic tests needed to include a test to differentiate between “safe” and “harmful” types of arsenic.
When the county government released the results of the tests for arsenic levels in McDonald’s cooking oil it emphasized that the results did not distinguish between “safe” and “harmful,” he said.
Chen’s remarks were made in response to reports that officials made a mistake publicizing the high levels of arsenic in the cooking oil at restaurants without distinguishing between the different types of arsenic.
Prosecutors said merely knowing the arsenic levels was not sufficient to determine whether the oil was harmful, because arsenic could also be found in the form of the organic compound arsenobetaine, which occurs naturally in fish and algae and is not harmful to humans.
Consumption of foods containing this compound, such as mushrooms, is safe. However, inorganic forms of the chemical are toxic and could pose a serious threat to a person’s health.
In July, the county government fined McDonald’s NT$150,000 under Article 11 of the Act Governing Food Sanitation (食品衛生管理法) after cooking oil in two of the company’s restaurants in Tucheng (土城) tested positive for arsenic on June 21.
The arsenic levels at the outlets were 1.038 parts per million (ppm) and 0.923ppm. The legal limit for arsenic in Taiwan is 0.1ppm.
In response, McDonald’s issued a statement saying the company was happy to hear about the prosecutors’ decision not to issue indictments and that it was working hard to win back consumer confidence in the quality of its products.
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