China has intensified inspections over food safety for the forthcoming Spring Festival, destroying nearly 10 tons of imported contaminated meat products recently.
According to the Shenzhen quarantine agency in south China's Guangdong Province, these frozen meat products are from four countries where highly contagious animal diseases have once broken out, Thursday's China Daily reported.
Huang Wanli, an employee with the local quarantine agency, said, "We seized 65 kilograms of frozen beef from Brazil and 940 kilograms of beef from Argentina -- both countries where foot-and-mouth disease was found."
China has not yet lifted its ban on imports of Brazilian beef, according to Liu Hong, an official with the commercial section of the Brazilian Embassy in Beijing.
The agency also found 3.8 tons of frozen goose wings from Israel, where Newcastle disease occurred last year.
A 5.09-ton batch of frozen pork tripe from Spain, where outbreaks of classical swine fever were reported last year, was also destroyed.
All the infected products came from a domestic frozen meat exchange market, said Huang. But she did not specify where it is.
In Beijing, the State General Administration for Quality Supervision and Inspection and Quarantine issued a notice to suspend imports of pig offal from 20 exporters in countries including the United States, Canada, France and Belgium.
China's quarantine authorities have found that nearly 1,000 tons of such products in more than 30 batches have been contaminated by listeria bacilli and salmonella germs since last November.
(Xinhua News Agency January 31, 2002)
