Shortage of Veterinary Professionals Makes Food Safety Hard to Guarantee
Lean meat powder, avian flu, toxic feed.... One after another, negative news items tied to the very source of food production keep erupting, amounting to a kind of fatigue bombing of consumers, yet they also constantly remind us that from place of production to dining table, there are far too many holes in food that have not been patched. The recent outbreaks involving lean meat powder, avian flu and toxic feed are only the tip of the iceberg.
According to the Food and Drug Administration of the Department of Health, last year (2011) it commissioned health bureaus in each county and city to sample and test a total of 481 livestock, poultry and aquatic products sold on the market at traditional markets, supermarkets and fresh-food supermarkets. Of these, 44 failed to meet regulations: 15 were livestock products, 5 were poultry products and 24 were aquatic products.
The main reasons for failing to meet regulations were as follows, in the lean meat powder category: 10 beef samples tested positive for ractopamine (ractopamin); 1 pork sample tested positive for salbutamol (subutamol) and 1 tested positive for ractopamine; 1 goose meat sample tested positive for Zilpaterol.
As for other veterinary drug residues, these included: 1 silkie chicken sample tested positive for the nitrofuran metabolite AMOZ and nicarbazin; 1 egg sample tested positive for nicarbazin; 1 duck egg sample tested positive for chloramphenicol; 1 poultry offal sample tested positive for nicarbazin; 2 grouper samples tested positive for reduced leucomalachite green; 1 tested positive for the nitrofuran metabolite AMOZ; 4 threadfin samples tested positive for reduced leucomalachite green, of which 1 also contained malachite green; 6 red snapper samples tested positive for reduced leucomalachite green, of which 3 also contained malachite green; 2 ponyfish samples tested positive for reduced leucomalachite green, of which 1 also contained malachite green; 2 flathead fish samples tested positive for reduced leucomalachite green; 5 clam samples tested positive for the nitrofuran metabolite AMOZ.
Setting aside for the moment whether the number of livestock, poultry and aquatic product samples commissioned for testing by the Food and Drug Administration was sufficient, whether the proportion of failures is representative, or whether these livestock, poultry and aquatic products were imported or domestically produced, after reading through a dizzying and shocking string of chemical names, the government and experts, apart from comforting everyone not to panic, perhaps need even more to confront the structural problem that "the shortage of veterinarians guarding the production source of Taiwan's livestock, poultry and aquatic products has allowed the 'Wang Lu-zai-xian' who sell illegal, fake and inferior veterinary drugs, vaccines and medicated feed additives to run rampant through farming and fishing villages," causing farmers and fishermen engaged in livestock raising and aquaculture to follow the Wang Lu-zai-xian's erroneous drug-use instructions and triggering food safety problems.
When people get sick, they seek a doctor to diagnose them, write a prescription and obtain medicine, but when the poultry and livestock raised by farmers get sick, they do not seek a veterinarian for diagnosis; instead they ask the drug peddlers or sales representatives who sell veterinary drugs. Yao Liang-yi, a young member of the Taiwan Rural Front whose family raises Taiwan native chickens, observed that in the countryside, those closest to farming households are not necessarily professional veterinarians, but rather these "Wang Lu-zai-xian" who sell veterinary drugs.
Yao Liang-yi said these Wang Lu-zai-xian come from varied backgrounds. Some are pharmaceutical company salespeople, some are independent salespeople working under the banner of a drug company, and some are even small vendors who have sold medicine for a long time and "taught themselves." The vast majority do not have the professional background of veterinary training. Because they sell veterinary drugs, they develop close relationships with farmers, so that when farmers encounter disease in their animals, their first thought is not necessarily to find a veterinarian, but to find these drug salespeople. What is more, domestically there is a severe shortage of veterinarians specializing in livestock and aquatic economic animals, so the "Wang Lu-zai-xian" often become the people farmers turn to for help, and farmers naturally become the targets these Wang Lu-zai-xian peddle to.
The lesson of lean meat powder "No. 8"
The year before last (2010), in Changhua, Yunlin, Chiayi, Kaohsiung and Pingtung, multiple cases broke out in which pigs tested positive for the use of "clenbuterol," whose toxicity is several thousand times stronger than the lean meat powder ractopamine. The person in charge surnamed Lin of Chihong Co., Ltd. bought "clenbuterol" from an unidentified man in mainland China, then sold it to the person in charge surnamed Liu of Yicheng Biotechnology. The person in charge surnamed Liu diluted bone meal, garlic essence, calcium powder and milk replacer into a finished product called "garlic essence" (1 kg of "beta-agonist" raw material could make 200 kg of finished product), then at prices ranging from 800 yuan to 1,200 yuan per kg of finished product, hired a man surnamed Su to sell it to unspecified pig farmers.
Chou Chin-cheng, dean and professor of National Taiwan University's School of Veterinary Medicine, said that although the veterinary department counts as a popular university department, the vast majority of students move toward studying small animals, such as pets like cats and dogs, thinking they can open their own animal hospitals after graduation. By contrast, veterinary talent for economic animals, such as poultry, livestock and aquatic animals, is extremely lacking. On the one hand, the working environment for diagnosing economic animals is harder; on the other hand, the pay the government provides for veterinarians working in livestock and aquaculture is poorer, leading to frequent staff turnover and making gaps in experience likely.
Take meat inspection work as an example. Because it must accommodate pig auction and slaughter habits, veterinarians mostly work in the early morning hours, living with day and night reversed. In addition, meat inspection work is handled by veterinarians contracted by the Central Trust of China on behalf of the Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine of the Council of Agriculture. With low pay and limited promotion channels, yet bearing heavy responsibility while being regarded as "quasi" civil servants, the turnover rate among meat inspection veterinarians is very high.
In addition, most of today's frontline livestock veterinarians were trained in the 70th year of the Republic of China era (1981), and after 30 years they are generally approaching retirement, while the new generation of veterinary students is mostly enthusiastic about small animals, leaving veterinarians for large animals facing insufficient numbers and a lack of clinical experience. Chou Chin-cheng said that in peacetime they might still cope, but with the recent successive outbreaks of avian flu and crackdowns on illegal use of lean meat powder, livestock veterinary manpower is severely insufficient.
Take the H5N2 avian flu outbreak as another example. Domestic research has pointed out that the gene of the H5N2 low-pathogenicity avian influenza virus strain first isolated in Taiwan in 2003 is a recombinant virus with surface antigens of the American virus group and internal structures of the Eurasian virus group. Based on evidence of viral evolution and the virus's main antigens, experts believe that the gene of the H5N2 avian influenza virus strain found in Taiwan is highly similar to and shares the same characteristics as the virus strains currently used internationally to make vaccines, and infer that the outbreak in Taiwan is related to illegal injection of inferior vaccines.
As for why farmers wanted to inject the H5N2 vaccine, it is because at that time China, Hong Kong, China and other neighboring countries successively saw outbreaks of H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza, and farmers worried that their chickens would become infected and die. Lacking veterinary consultation, and under the promotion of salespeople, they intentionally or unintentionally injected the H5N2 vaccine, hoping it could also prevent chickens from being infected with H5N1. Because the inferior H5N2 vaccine was not completely inactivated, it brought the virus strain into Taiwan's environment, causing the H5N2 virus strain to later evolve toward high pathogenicity.
If the health of Taiwan's livestock and aquatic animals relies on the elusive "Wang Lu-zai-xian" operating behind the scenes to guard it, while ignoring the serious problems of insufficient numbers of veterinarians and imbalance among specialties in the country, there is no guarantee that after "No. 8" there will not be "No. 9," "No. 10".... Cases of illegal use or residues of veterinary drugs will be a cycle that keeps repeating.
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