After the scandal in which contaminated pet food killed possibly thousands of pets in the United States, there remain growing questions about the safety of Chinese produce. Therefore, the business hub of Shanghai is introducing a food testing van for spot checks and investigations to crackdown on contaminated food.
Workers arrange eggs, which have the labels of the place and date of production attached to them, during a fair in Haikou, south China’s Hainan Province.
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Gu Zhenhua, head of the food safety under Shanghai Food and Drug Administration, said:
The fast-testing system will carry out the initial checking and those samples that prove problematic will be sent to labs for further check.
Food scandals have surfaced in China repeatedly: Babies have died after being fed fake baby formula, eggs have been impregnated with dangerous dyes to make their yolks redder and raise their sale price, and children have been injected with worthless rabies vaccine that is nothing but saltwater.
The US Food and Drug Administration found last week that two Chinese companies added lethal chemical melamine to wheat gluten and rice protein which was later used in pet food. Contaminated food has increasingly turned up abroad, occasionally leading to blanket bans.
The scandals have the potential to threaten China’s farm exports, posing a major headache for the communist government, which has been struggling to jump-start rural growth.
These vans hope to eliminate the need for expensive and time-consuming laboratory tests.
Source: DNA
