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GFSF serves as an industry platform to help improve food safety in the Asian market. This blog offers the most up-to-date news on Asia's food safety events.

Friday, January 31, 2014

Local watchdogs empowered in food safety shake-up


Chinese provincial governments are quickly empowering local food safety watchdogs in line with the requirements of the central government to prevent food scandals.

Since the China Food and Drug Administration was launched during the cabinet restructuring of last March to supervise the full process of food production, circulation and consumption, a primary mission of provincial governments has been to correspondingly restructure their food safety monitoring mechanism.

During the reshuffle, the functions of quality inspection departments are intensified as they gain food safety jurisdiction previously held by health as well as industry and commerce departments.

To make sure the reshuffle runs smoothly and efficiently, the China Food and Drug Administration has sent out work teams to various provinces.

While inspecting the work in central China's Hunan Province in mid-January, Liu Peizhi, vice minister of the administration, urged provincial governments to complete the reshuffle as quickly as possible on the premise that the restructured outfits could have sufficient resources to fulfill the mission of the administration.

The administration is yet to announce the progress of the nationwide restructuring.

However, Li Hongyuan, director of the food and drug administration of Xiamen City in east China's Fujian Province, was quoted by the Xiamen Daily as saying that more than two-thirds of 31 provincial regions in the Chinese mainland have completed relevant restructuring so far.

Yan Zuqiang, chief of the Shanghai Municipal Food and Drug Administration, said that one goal of the restructuring was to increase the number of grassroots inspectors.

Describing the human resources structure of the old monitoring mechanism as "olive-shaped," with the higher management on the top and grassroots inspectors on the bottom largely outnumbered by middle management, Yan said that law enforcement at the grassroots level has been very weak.

After the restructuring, he said, the number of local grassroots inspectors in Shanghai had risen to 1,700, representing the bulk of the city bureau's staff.

Food safety has become a top concern in China as a string of safety scandals, particularly the one in 2008 when melamine-tainted baby formula caused the deaths of at least six infants and sickened 300,000 others, have crippled customer confidence.

Shanghai municipal legislator Xu Liping agreed that the weakness of food safety supervision was at the grassroots.

"The number of inspectors cannot be increased infinitely. The key is to improve their competency and work style," said Xu.

Zhao Renrong, deputy to the Shanghai People's Congress, the city's legislature, proposed that a nationwide blacklisting system be established based on the credit records of food business managers.

"Without such a system, a business owner who breaks the law can easily run away from his problems by reopening another shop under the name of his relative," said Zhao, also chief of the Tingdong Village Branch of the Communist Party of China in Shanghai's Jinshan District.

Although many places including Shanghai have started to experiment with blacklisting lawbreakers, Liu Zhengguo, director of the enterprise credit management committee of the metropolis, said that a nationwide credit system was badly needed to prevent lawbreakers continuing their malpractice elsewhere in the country.

"We must ensure no Chinese can afford to have a bad record in terms of food safety in this country," he said.

Liu Boying, director of the Commission of Commerce in Hongkou District in Shanghai, suggested that digital technologies should be widely used to strengthen certification of products' origins.

For instance, consumers should be able to learn the exact breeding information of aquatic products by scanning the label, said Liu, adding that the biggest challenge was how to raise the enthusiasm of enterprises with certifications of origin.

To solve the problem, Shanghai has started legislation on compulsory certification of the origin of foodstuff, which may cover pork, vegetables, aquatic products, grain crops, dairy and cooking oil, according to the municipality's food safety supervision chief Yan Zuqiang.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Bird Flu Isn’t Just China’s Problem Anymore


With the Chinese New Year and the Olympics on the horizon, health officials can only watch and wait for a potential pandemic.



                                                                                                                       Computer rendering of an avian influenza virus


And that means the next plane could bring a pandemic to the U.S. or anywhere else around the world. “The bottom line is the health security of the U.S. is only as strong as the health security of every country around the world,” says Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. “We are all connected by the food we eat, the water the drink and the air we breathe.”
As the first human cases of H7N9 bird flu infection outside of China begin to emerge—in Taiwan and Hong Kong—health officials around the world are preparing for a potentially perfect storm for a massive flu outbreak. On Thursday, billions of Chinese will be on the move to celebrate the Lunar New Year, creating ripe conditions for the spread of the influenza virus from those already infected. And many of those celebrations will include chickens, the primary carriers of H7N9. In addition, with the Winter Olympics, one of the world’s largest sporting events, just two weeks away, the virus could find the ideal conditions for breaking out.
So far, the World Health Organization reports that 246 people, mostly in China, have been infected with H7N9 since the virus was first identified last year, and nearly a quarter of them have died. As the first cases outside of the China emerged, Hong Kong officials ordered the culling of 20,000 chickens from its primary poultry market after one bird tested positive for H7N9, and banned live poultry imports for three weeks from the mainland. In the meantime the Chinese government is shutting down live poultry sales in its eastern provinces after a spike in cases in recent weeks. Because H7N9 does not make birds sick, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish infected poultry from healthy animals, so officials aren’t taking any chances. Shanghai is closing its live poultry markets for three months beginning in February.
What concerns health experts is that H7N9 meets two of the three conditions for becoming a pandemic—it is widespread among birds, and it can pass from birds to people. So far, it does not appear to transmit easily from person to person, but if it did, says Frieden, “that would be a big problem. The likelihood of having a pandemic would be much, much higher.”
What could push the virus to move from person to person? One worrying possibility—as H7N9 circulates among birds, it could recombine with other influenza strains and find a way to infect humans more efficiently by jumping from host to host. It’s also possible that the H7N9 infecting people could recombine with other strains currently circulating, such as H1N1 or even H5N1, another bird flu, and become more virulent as well. Vietnam confirmed that a 52-year old man died this week of H5N1.
If H7N9 were to become a pandemic, there is a vaccine that researchers have developed, but Frieden says it’s not very effective and may require more than one dose, which could complicate distribution if there were an urgent need to immunize the population. But other measures for containing outbreaks that have proven effective in the past, including reducing the contact between people and infected animals, implementing social distancing strategies to prevent rapid spread of the virus, and dispensing medications to treat the severely ill, could help to contain an outbreak. “Flu reminds us that we are all connected by the air we breathe,” says Frieden. “There is no way for us to know if a pandemic will happen tomorrow or 10 years from now or never. But what we can do is be even better prepared than we have in the past if it happens.”

Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Chinese Chicken Ban Proposed By Food Safety Advocates



A Chinese chicken ban petition was recently posted on Change.org and is rapidly gaining signatures. Concerns that chicken from China could soon make its way into the American food supply sparked the movement, which has more than 250,000 signatures. Last year the US Department of Agriculture announced that chicken processed in China would be allowed to be sold in the United States.
The Chinese chicken ban organizers refer to themselves simply as “three concerned moms and food safety advocates.” The women also stated that they are hoping that the Change.org petition will prompt both Congress and the USDA to ban poultry processed in China from public school menus and prevent the meat from ever making it to the American market.
The Philippines recently banned Chinese chicken over fears that the “highly pathogenic “avian influenza (bird flu), HPAI, was present in the poultry. The ban was enacted after evidence reportedly revealed that food safety failures have occurred multiple times. The food security incidents include dangerous levels of mercury being found in baby formula, rat meat sold as lamb, and the discovery of thousands of diseased pig carcasses in the Huangpu River.
Dr. Barbara Kowalyck, one of the Chinese chicken petition organizers, said:
"I know first-hand the devastating impact of a breakdown in the food safety system. China has had numerous problems with food safety, and it is clear that, as of now, they do not have a robust food safety system. Importing poultry that has been processed i n China is risky, and it's a risk we don't have to take and should not be forced to take. Food safety should never be taken for granted - especially when our children are involved."
In 2001 Dr. Kowalyck’s toddler son died from complications related to an E. coli infection. In her position as a faculty members at North Carolina State University, she has worked tirelessly on the food safety front and co-founded the Center for Foodborne Illness Research and Prevention. She also serves on the advisory board for the Health Policy Institute’s Produce Safety Project at Georgetown University and has been a member of the USDA National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods.
The deadly avian influenza virus may be spreading between people, according to a report by Off The Grid News. Researchers believe that a woman in China caught the bird flu, or H7N9 virus, from her father and not from poultry. Both the woman and her father died from the disease. The woman, just 32 years old and reported to be healthy, had no contact with poultry. Instead, her only known exposure to the disease was visiting her mortally ill father in the hospital. The father made regular visits to a live poultry market.
Excerpt from the Change.org. Chinese chicken ban petition:
"We urge Congress, President Obama, and his administration to stop chicken from, or processed in, China from reaching our supermarkets and the meals we feed our school children by: (1) Ensuring that Chinese-processed chicken is not included in the national School lunch Program, School Breakfast Program, Child and Adult Care Food Program and Summer Food Service Program; and (2) Preventing funds from being used to implement any rule that would allow poultry raised or slaughtered in China to be exported to the United States."
New signatures on the Chinese chicken ban are emailed to USDA Secretary of Agriculture Tim Vilsack, President Obama, and Representatives Sam Farr and Robert Aderholt, as well as Senators Mark Pryor and Roy Blunt.

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/1112101/chinese-chicken-ban-proposed-by-food-safety-advocates/#ffVckgddt90G6pT0.99

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

No timetable for GM food sales






No Timetable for GMO Food Sales in China

China's Ministry of Agriculture last Wednesday said that there was not yet a timetable for the commercialization of genetically modified food, while the safety certificates for the country's GMO rice and corn would expire soon. In recent years, Chinese citizens have been concerned with the potential harm of GMOs on human health and questioned the safety of consuming GMO foods. This wave of public pressure on the Chinese government has made the state government hesitate to use GMOs in food production.

Chen Xiaohua, vice-minister of the Ministry of Agriculture, stated that the ministry will continue to scrutinize the commercial production of GMO food, as a response to a question on the expiration of China's first batch of safety certificates for GMO rice and corn, which were issued in 2009. The certificates are scheduled to expire this year but their commercial production is yet to be started.

As Chen stressed China's "active and cautious" policy toward GMO food, the Ministry of Agriculture also began to strengthen research and try to breed new GMO strains with independent intellectual property rights as quickly as possible. By "cautious," Chen means that the Chinese government would work to ensure safety in promoting and applying GM food. “That's why we have made strict laws and regulations, and set up a whole set of safety evaluation mechanisms and a regulating chain involving various departments," said Chen. His remarks suggested that the commercialization of GM food could not be approved in the short term due to public fears about its safety. The public does not have much knowledge about GMO food, which increases their fear, especially as food safety issues have been a heated topic.

Although the government has stressed that research on GM products is encouraged, scientists may still feel disappointed and unconfident about the future of such research, as it is costly and currently cannot make much profit. The promotion of GMO food has been a controversial issue for a long time, as some scientists claim that the only way to solve the growing food security problem in China is to plant GMO crops. More than 60 scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering jointly submitted a letter to top authorities in July 2013, calling for promoting the planting of GMO rice.

However, the public is skeptical about GMO safety and continues to exert pressure on the Chinese government. Some local governments have banned GMOs under public pressure. Zhangye in Northwest China's Gansu Province banned any enterprises and organizations from growing, trading and using GM seeds, not products, in October 2013, in order to ensure the safety reputation of its agricultural products, which made it the first city in China to issue such a measure.


CCTV7: GFSF helped to improve China's food safety.


GFSF China hosted a summit on food safety in Jan, 2014. China's famous food companies such as Maotai and Bright Foods joined GFSF.

sannong.cntv.cn/program/jjsannong/20140115/101178.shtml