By Wen Shuping (温淑萍)

News, page 6
Issue No. 548, Dec 12, 2011

Translated by Zhu Na

Original Article: [Chinese]

The EO has learned that the Ministry of Health will introduce a new food safety standard for certain kinds of frozen food on Dec 21. According to the new standards, each gram of the raw product will only be permitted to contain 1,000 to 10,000 staphyloccocus aureus (金黄色葡萄球菌) which is also known as golden staph, a bacteria that is one of the most common cause of staph infections. According to the existing rules, these frozen foods are not permitted to contain any traces of the bacteria at all.

Although the old standards, which came into effect in May 2004, stated that no trace of the bacterium could be present in frozen food products, in reality, some well-known brands of frozen dumplings, such as Sanquan (三全) and Synear (思念), tested positive to presence of golden staph.

A person involved in developing the new food safety standard told the EO that China’s this standard was in keeping with best international practice and are included in the Codex Alimentarius, a collection of internationally recognized standards, codes of practice, guidelines and other recommendations relating to foods, food production and food safety.
 
A person familiar with the issue explained that, the Codex Alimentarius Commission (CAC) wouldn't necessarily set the testing standard as zero for a potentially lethal microbial pathogen, for example toxic substances like melamine and aflatoxin are permitted, as long as the quantity present is below a certain fixed amount

"Because if the standards were further tightened, there would be large economic losses. Many kinds of grain products could not be used as the raw material for food products due to the fact that they had exceeded the permitted level of golden staph, meaning that these products could only be used for animal feed, the costs and the losses would be enormous."

"If implemented according to the old rule, tens of thousands of food enterprises would have to be shut down, but if we loosen the standard, the number of deaths per 100 million of population would only increase by 1 to 3 people, given the overall situation, the enterprises appear to have a stronger argument," the same person said.

One health expert told the EO that he was concerned that the loosening of the standards in relation to the amount of golden staph permitted to be present in certain frozen foods, would encourage many food producers to test their luck and result in serious violations of the standards.

The same expert complained that "the departments in charge of testing food companies weren't transparent or timely in relation to releases of test reports, even when they finally do release a report, it will be written in such a way that anyone who doesn't work in the field will not be able to understand it, providing companies with more room to pursue their private interests."