Poisoning response strange

Doubts about the Taipei City Department of Health’s response to the Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) food poisoning are growing. It started on March 24 on the day of the poisonings when the bureau began its investigation. When inspectors arrived at the restaurant, they did not collect food for testing. They missed their chance to secure valuable evidence. The department said that the guidelines did not require inspectors to collect food samples during an investigation’s first stage, but is this true?

Article 4 of the Food and Drug Administration’s “Key handling procedures for suspected food poisoning incidents” (疑似食品中毒事件處理要點) states that if there are divisions of sampling labor for specimens in suspected food poisoning incidents, local health departments bear responsibility for collecting food samples, as well as conducting environmental testing on cutlery, chopping boards, potable water, dishwashing water, etc.

When Taipei’s health department was taking samples, they sooner or later would have discovered that there were no food remnants left to be collected. The procedural guidelines include the collection of grain and noodle products, black wood ear mushrooms, cabbage, bean sprouts, hongxi mushrooms and pandan leaves, as well as all the restaurant’s sauces suspected of causing the poisoning.

How could the department say that current guidelines do not require inspectors to collect samples in an investigation’s first stage?

More ridiculous is that Department Commissioner Chen Yen-yuen (陳彥元) said that the Food and Drug Administration did not stipulate that the city health department has to take samples of all food items, and that central and local government specialists could discuss amending the procedural guidelines.

Does the city health department really need to take samples of all the food items in the first stage of the investigation? If this is true, then more inspectors would need to be on the case.

The problem with their excuse is that in the collection of “suspected food products,” inspectors only need to take samples from “suspected problematic ingredients” used in the affected dishes consumed by food poisoning victims. What does this tell us about Chen’s explanation? What reason is there to expand the number of inspectors on the case?

The more the city health department says, the worse off it looks.

YU MENG-TIE Taipei