New Power Party (NPP) Legislator Claire Wang (王婉諭) on Friday called for breast milk to be regulated after a YouTube channel drew criticism for its descriptions of breast milk purchased online.
In a video posted on Tuesday last week, YouTuber Hsiao-yu (小玉) was seen tasting breast milk purchased online and describing it as spoiled soy milk.
The video met with angry responses from the public, including mothers who breastfeed their children.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
At a news conference with lactation experts on Friday, Wang said that the video communicated incorrect information and was disrespectful toward mothers.
For several years, local representatives and groups have been drawing attention to the “chaos” that is the sale of breast milk online, she said.
Citing information from the US Food and Drug Administration, Wang said that a baby could risk contracting HIV, hepatitis and other diseases if they drink breast milk that is not from their birth mother and which has not been tested.
However, breast milk is still listed on major e-commerce platforms and regulations do not specify whether it can be sold as a product, she said.
When similar incidents have occurred in the past, local governments have only been able to use the Consumer Protection Act (消費者保護法) to order sellers to take down listings of breast milk of unknown origin, Wang said.
This is a “passive” and “unreasonable” measure, she said, adding that the act regulates products that are being sold legally, but breast milk has never been a legal product.
Moreover, responding to lawmakers’ questions in 2016, the Ministry of Health and Welfare said that breast milk was a “bodily fluid and not a product,” she said.
The Food and Drug Administration identifies breast milk as a bodily fluid and not food, and thus it is not subject to the regulations in the Act Governing Food Safety and Sanitation (食品安全衛生管理法), Wang said.
The Centers for Disease Control said that although breast milk is a bodily fluid and has certain transmission risks, it is not considered a “specimen of communicable disease” as defined in the Communicable Disease Control Act (傳染病防治法), she said.
While the Health Promotion Administration said that it does not support any form of breast milk trade, it does not have clear rules restricting it, Wang said.
As the government does not support the public sale of breast milk from unknown origins, the Ministry of Health and Welfare should lay out clear regulations, Wang said.
Taiwan Academy of Breastfeeding representative Fang Li-jung (方麗容), who is responsible for Taipei City Hospital’s Human Milk Bank, said that as some diseases can be transmitted through breast milk, the purpose of the bank is to provide safe breast milk.
The institution uses a meticulous process to ensure the milk is safe, she said.
Consuming breast milk purchased online is very risky, she said, adding that it is “absolutely unfit” for children to consume.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching