Nation

Officials punished following additive scandal

(China Daily)
Updated: 2011-03-19 07:43

ZHENGZHOU - Three senior animal husbandry officials in Central China's Henan province have been suspended from duty, while other officials were in police custody after pigs tested positive for a chemical poisonous to humans, the provincial government said on Friday.

Chiefs of animal husbandry bureaus in Mengzhou city, Qinyang city and Wenxian county received duty suspension notices after 52 pigs tested positive for clenbuterol, which is poisonous to humans, said Liu Xuezhou, a member of the provincial food safety leadership group.

Another 27 officials in the province were in police custody, sacked or suspended from duty, said Liu, who is also chief of Henan provincial department of health.

The local authorities conducted urine tests on 1,512 pigs at nine pig farms, with 52 animals testing positive. The farms are suspected to have fed food laced with clenbuterol to the pigs.

Also, the province intends to randomly test more than 1.63 million pigs in five counties and cities.

Liu said meat products containing clenbuterol will be tracked down and stopped from entering the market.

In Nanjing, capital of East China's Jiangsu province, 264 pigs at Xingwang Slaughter House were killed and buried after pigs believed to be from Mengzhou city tested positive for clenbuterol, said Hua Wen, deputy chief of the city's food and drug supervision bureau.

Authorities randomly picked 20 out of the 264 pigs for urine tests on Wednesday, and all tests came back positive.

Hua said 600 kilograms of pork from a nearby pork market were also destroyed.

Other provinces such as Gansu and Shanxi have also strengthened management and monitoring of pig and pork supply chains to prevent clenbuterol-contained products from being sold.

The central government has introduced a series of measures to block pork containing clenbuterol from entering the market, the Ministry of Commerce (MOC) said in a statement on Friday.

The MOC had sent a working team to Henan province to help with local governments' investigations, said the statement posted on the ministry's website.

Besides conducting on-site supervision of companies involved in the scandal, the MOC issued an urgent circular requiring the local authorities to conduct thorough examinations of slaughter houses and strict implementation of relevant quality inspection systems.

The authorities are making efforts to recall the contaminated pork and trace its source and will promptly release information to the public, according to the statement.

Clenbuterol is a chemical that can be fed to pigs to prevent them from accumulating fat. It is banned as an additive in pig feed in China because it can end up in the flesh of pigs and is poisonous to humans if ingested.

Xinhua

(China Daily 03/19/2011 page3)