US beef production traceability management is lax, and the shadow of mad cow disease is hard to dispel
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The United States Department of Agriculture stresses that the newly occurring case is "atypical mad cow disease," that the cause of the animal's illness should be spontaneous rather than the result of eating feed containing meat-and-bone meal carrying the mutated prion protein, and that it cannot be transmitted to humans. Zhou Jincheng (Chou Chin-cheng) considers such inferences premature.
He points out that, compared with Europe, Japan and Canada, the United States has not built a complete beef production traceability system, and that U.S. officials to date have given an unclear account of the epidemiological history of the animal in the newly discovered mad cow case, highlighting that there is still enormous room for improvement in the production management of U.S. cattle, and that the future may still be overshadowed by mad cow disease. From the U.S. example, one can also find that the gene of the "mutated prion protein," the pathogen that causes mad cow disease, can mutate, and it must not be taken lightly.
In order to declare its determination to safeguard citizens' food safety, the government emphasizes that it adopts "three controls and five checks" measures for imported beef. The "three controls" are control at the source, control at the border and control of the market; the "five checks" are five border checkpoints, including verifying all kinds of certification documents, clearly labeling product information, opening boxes for rigorous inspection, effectively testing food safety, and real-time verification through information links.
From the perspective of battling the problem abroad and managing the chain from the place of origin to the dining table, "control at the source" is the most important; therefore the government emphasizes that every year it sends teams made up of experts, veterinarians and officials from relevant agencies such as the Department of Health and the Council of Agriculture to the beef-exporting countries to inspect on the ground the plants that export beef to Taiwan, to confirm whether their food hygiene and safety measures for preventing mad cow disease meet our country's requirements.
However, Zhou Jincheng believes that, compared with Japan, the rigor of Taiwan's sending teams of officials to U.S. plants exporting beef to Taiwan for "inspection" can only be counted as a "visit," because all the itineraries are specially arranged by U.S. officials, and the proportion of plants visited is also very limited.
Taiwan currently approves 52 U.S. beef plants for export to Taiwan, but in the year before last (Year 99 of the Republic of China), only 6 were visited, and last year (Year 100 of the Republic of China), only 3 were visited. Although officials stress that the beef exported to Taiwan from these few plants accounts for more than 40 to 50 percent of all U.S. beef exported to Taiwan, so the inspection results are representative, Zhou Jincheng believes that the government's plant inspections in the United States take place only once a year, and that the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine of the Council of Agriculture stations only one veterinarian in the United States; ordinarily this veterinarian is so busy with administrative and official document work that he has no spare capacity, so how can he truly carry out the responsibility of inspecting plants and guarding the gate?
Zhou Jincheng calls on the government to recognize that, from the detection of multiple cases of the leanness-enhancing drug ractopamine residue in U.S. beef on the market, it is clear that the government's "three controls and five checks" have long since failed. In the face of the even more dangerous mad cow disease, the government really needs to follow Japan's example and station more veterinarians in the United States to carry out meat slaughter inspection work, so as to guard the food safety of the people.
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Council of Agriculture press release
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