China Looking Into Tainted Dumplings
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Thursday, January 31, 2008; 12:39 AM
BEIJING -- Chinese export safety authorities said Thursday they were investigating a company that made insecticide-tainted dumplings that sickened 10 people in Japan.
The frozen dumplings made by Tianyang Food Processing were contaminated with traces of an organic phosphorus insecticide called methamidophos, which caused severe abdominal pains, vomiting and diarrhea, Japanese officials said.
China's General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, which oversees export safety, said it had heard the news and was "paying great attention to it."
"We have quickly gotten in touch with the Japanese side to get a detailed understanding of the situation," the AQSIQ said in a statement posted on its Web site. "We have already started an investigation and will release the results in a timely manner."
Telephone calls to Tianyang and its parent company, Hebei Foodstuffs Import & Export Group, were not answered on Thursday.
The reputation of China's exports have suffered the past year after a number of potentially deadly chemicals were found in goods ranging from toothpaste to toys to a pet food ingredient.
It declared a four-month quality and safety improvement campaign which ended in December a success.
Japanese health officials said they suspended imports of all products from Tianyang and were conducting a nationwide survey of any additional dumplings-related health problems.
Japan's Health Ministry has also ordered the dumplings' importer and distributor, JT Foods Co. Ltd. _ an affiliate of Japan's largest tobacco company _ to recall the tainted dumplings. JT Foods had distributed 13 tons of dumplings each in the prefectures (states) of Chiba and Hyogo, the ministry said.
"I'm afraid that there was a rather loose safety awareness on the Chinese side," Japan's Chief Cabinet Secretary Nobutaka Machimura said at a regular news conference Thursday. "Now the problems have occurred, we urge China to closely investigate what exactly is going on."
Three people in Hyogo and seven in Chiba near Tokyo were sickened, some of the seriously including a 5-year-old girl who regained consciousness after falling into a coma, the ministry said.
Traces of methamidophos were found in the dumplings, their containers and the patients' vomit, it said.
Japan has in recent months been hit with its own slew of domestic food safety scandals involving recycled red bean filling, mislabeled meat and the use of out-of-date milk, cream and eggs in a popular brand of cream puffs.
In 2000, Snow Brand Milk Products Co. shipped old milk and sickened more than 14,000 people, the country's worst-ever outbreak of food poisoning.