Quality officials check
electronic scales at a store in the Kaixuanmen Healthy Food Market
yesterday.
Consumers should be cautious when choosing precious Chinese
tonics, because some products are not what they seem, inspectors
said yesterday.
Officials from the Shanghai Bureau of Quality and Technical
Supervision carried out a secret inspection at the Kaixuanmen
Healthy Food Market in Zhabei District, finding two of the 10
booths they inspected cheated consumers on quantity.
From a booth called Zhenyou Ginseng Store in the market,
officials bought 20 grams of pilose antler of young stag, priced at
22.5 yuan (US$3) a gram.
But the actual weight of the product was only 9.24 grams.
Another booth called Shanghai Zhongtian Health Food Store
inserted toothpicks into its ginseng, which cost about 43 yuan a
gram. Bureau officials bought about five grams of ginseng, but the
actual weight of ginseng was only 2.21 grams.
"As such products are usually expensive, consumers will sustain
big losses even if the scales are out by just one gram," said Zhang
Shaoning, an engineer from the bureau's quantity evaluation
center.
Shanghai Food and Drug Administration said yesterday that checks
in late December also found quality problems with a large number of
precious Chinese tonics sold in small stores and stalls in tonic
markets.
The SFDA conducted a series of checks on precious and expensive
tonics between December 20 and 26. After checking 1,700 ginsengs
and more than 1,900 grams of dongchongxiacao, or cordyceps,
officials discovered 186 batches with suspected quality
problems.
"A high percentage of the problems involved disguising fake
dongchongxiacao with no medical use as the real thing," said Tang
Minghao, vice director of Shanghai Food and Drug
Administration.
Tang said some sellers had mixed poor-quality wild ginseng with
the higher quality product to cheat customers.
(Shanghai Daily January 17, 2008)
