A case of cross-contamination might have caused Taichung Health Bureau to erroneously detect banned additives in a sample of pork slices provided by Taiwan Sugar Corp (Taisugar, 台糖), Premier Chen Chien-jen (陳建仁) told lawmakers yesterday.
The Taichung Health Bureau on Feb. 2 said that a sample of Taisugar’s “Pork Boston Butt, Sliced” at a General Welfare Service store in Taichung was found to contain 0.002 parts per million (ppm) of cimbuterol in a test conducted on Jan. 15.
The government and local health authorities nationwide have since conducted additional tests on pork products and no traces of cimbuterol have been found in pork products tested.
Photo: Chen Chih-chu, Taipei Times
The government has no direct evidence that a mistake was made at the municipal agency’s laboratory, but no reasonable alternative explanation could be found, Chen said in his report to the legislature yesterday on the Cabinet’s handling of food safety issues.
Citing the Taichung Health Bureau’s report to the government, Chen said the bureau conducted 22 tests on the same pork sample to find minute traces of cimbuterol, a leanness-enhancing chemical not allowed in Taiwan.
When a laboratory detects a very small amount of a banned substance in a food product, the standard protocol is for the testing agency to ask the government to verify the result, he said.
Taisugar should have been notified that a banned substance was found in its product and given 15 days to confirm the finding with another laboratory, he added.
The Taichung Health Bureau disregarded both protocols, Chen said.
The bureau’s laboratory almost certainly erred in carrying out the tests since no traces of the chemical were found in samples taken from pork raised on an identical feed and processed by the same company, he said.
A total of 921 samples have been tested as free of the additive — 793 samples tested by the Ministry of Agriculture, 92 tested by the Ministry of Health and Welfare and 36 by laboratories conducting examinations for Taisugar, Chen said.
Police do not believe that the incident is part of a mass poisoning for extortion scheme due to the low amount of the additive discovered, he said.
A poisoner would have used more of the substance to make the threat obvious, Chen said.
Acting Minister of Agriculture Chen Junne-jih (陳駿季) said pork prices were not affected by the additive scare, showing that public confidence in the safety of domestic pork is strong.
Minister of Economic Affairs Wang Mei-hua (王美花) said that Taisugar suffered NT$52 million (US$1.65 million) of losses in connection to the recall of the product and the state-owned enterprise has expressed the hope that there would be recompense for the damage to the brand’s reputation.
Meanwhile, following reports that Taichung Health Bureau personnel burst into tears on Wednesday in a meeting with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) because they could not accept the allegation that the tainted case was a result of laboratory contamination, Chen told reporters that the FDA expert panel’s findings should be respected.
Additional reporting by Lee Wen-hsin and CNA
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