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VIII
# PROVISIONAL URBAN COUNCIL
suggestion is in actual fact a direct cut of the public's right to know, supervise and speak on policies governing food safety and environmental hygiene.
Secondly, I move on to the cause of the recent series of food safety incidents. Are they the result of division of power? Are they the result of no policy uniformity between the two municipal councils? Or are there other reasons? Will removing the two councils' functions of food safety and environmental hygiene eliminate the root cause to our series of food safety incidents? We should analyse these questions from a practical angle.
In order to understand objectively the real causes of our recent series of food hygiene incidents. I have adopted the form of a statistical table to list out food hygiene cases of genuine public concern and wide media coverage in the year and a half from January last year to June this year. I have also tried to show the relationship of nine factors to each food incident (please refer to the statistical table of analysis of 12 food incidents in the past year and a half). The table gives rise to the following observations:
(1) None of the causes of these 12 food hygiene incidents point to no uniformity of the councils' policies. The 12 cases from the scare over Bacillus Anthracis infection in imported milk products of Australia in March last year to the recent incident of Ciguatoxin poison in fish all have wide impacts, but not one of them is the result of no uniformity of the policies of the two municipal councils. True, there may be some lack of uniformity in policies, but they are not the causes of the food incidents. This is a point we cannot afford to be ambiguous about. (2) The majority of these 12 incidents have to do with food imported from places outside the territory. From the table, we can see that 10 of the 12 incidents (or 83%) can be traced to imported food. There were only 5 cases of local cause, or 42%. Of these 5 cases, 3 can be attributed to imported food as the main cause. I mean 157:H7 E-coli in beef, overdose of pesticide in imported vegetables, cholera in bloody clams imported from Thailand, Beta-agonist in pig internal organs, Ciguatoxin in coral reef fish and so on.
(3) The local cause of the 12 food cases remains that there is no established quarantine mechanism for imported food. We still rely on health certificates of export countries or sampling checks at the stage of retail. Cases attributable to this number 9 out of 12, or 75%. Although there are ordinances to regulate such matters, slack implementation and loose supervision can be the main causes of untoward incidents. We can see from the statistical table that the local cause in this respect accounts for 75% or 9 cases. For example, in the case of cholera bacteria in bloody clams imported from Thailand, it resulted from our not having a complete system of quarantine for imported shellfish and our reliance on hygiene certificates issued by export countries. In the case of Beta-agonist in three kinds of pig internal organs, the problem lied with no quarantine system on live pigs implemented by the Agriculture and
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