sabato 23 agosto 2008

BEIJING: Olympic food proves safe


(BEIJING, August 22) -- No single safety incident has occurred related to food for the Beijing Olympics since August 7, 2008, the eve of the Games, an official said on Friday, August 22.
From August 7 to 21, supervisors from the Olympic food safety guarantee team stationed in the Olympic Village, the Media Village, the MPC, the IBC and all competition venues have monitored a total of 1,616,830 sets of meals, including breakfasts, lunches, dinners and late night snacks for athletes, officials and accredited media members. They did not find a single food safety issue, said Tang Yunhua, spokesperson for Food Safety Coordination at the Beijing Food Safety Administration Office.
During that period, no food safety incidents have occurred in raw materials distributed to Olympic competition venues, non-competition venues, training sites, Olympic Family hotels, hotels for VIPs, hotels that athletes use, hotels used by accredited media or Olympic food production enterprises or bases, Tang told reporters at a press conference at the Main Press Center (MPC).
Random inspections in the past 18 months on a total of 16,610 samples from food suppliers have shown a qualification rate of 98.67%. Food products below standard have been sealed or destroyed, to ensure that food supply for the Olympics is 100 percent qualified, she added.
The food safety authority in the city has set up an emergency response system and applied efficient technologies to cope with food safety issues in all Olympic venues and food-producing enterprises.
Tang outlined four key tasks being performed:
-- Control over all agriculture and livestock farms to ban high pesticide residue and a full tracing of animal products
-- Strict inspection of food production processes and strict control of food exiting production sites
-- Application of high technologies in distribution and transportation processes, including utilization of a GPS system, electronic labeling and temperature censoring to ensure food safety
-- Thorough training for employees before the assumption of posts and application of menu and raw material filing systems, as well as sampling of prepared food
The official promised to promote those measures that have proved efficient to benefit a great majority of community members after the Olympics are over.
Responding to a question on what kind of risks designers targeted before safety measures took shape, Tang said the steps were worked out to avoid biological, chemical and general physical pollution. Additional measures were also formulated to fight man-made malicious incidents and food-borne illnesses frequently seen in summer.
Present at the press conference were also Lu Yong, director of the Beijing Food Safety Monitoring Center and Luo Yunbo, dean of the Food Science and Nutritional Engineering College of China Agriculture University and member of the Beijing Olympic Food Safety Expert Committee.

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