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CAFIA keeps controlling foodstuffs from China due to melamine content
02/12/2010Almost a year and a half has passed since the whole world was shaken by the case of melamine in foodstuffs originating in China. Chinese farmers with the awareness of Chinese producers added melamine to milk in order to conceal its unfavourable nutritional values. The public learned about this deception only at the time when in China the number of children with kidney problems started to rise considerably. These problems were caused by consumption of milk nutrition made of contaminated milk. China even confessed to several deaths of children.
The whole world reacted to this case by control tightening for Chinese milk products and also for so-called compound foodstuffs into which the Chinese milk was added only partially. In the European Union the ban on import of Chinese milk products had been valid a long time before. In September 2008 due to the incident the European Commission had extended the ban also on import of foodstuffs with a milk ingredient which were intended for infants and small children. In other Chinese foodstuffs containing even a minute amount of milk the supervision authorities of the EU countries had been obliged to verify possible content of melamine already during control at the borders. Only the goods which had been determined as safe, was allowed to be released on the European market.
Even today, many months later news appear in the media from time to time, that China is still having problems with melamine in milk. However, in this regard the European consumers may remain calm, stricter measures for import of risky Chinese products are still being applied in the European Union. In their appliance CAFIA also takes part. In 2009, for example, CAFIA carried out nearly two thousands controls aimed at Chinese foodstuffs with a milk ingredient. In the framework of these controls and also import controls of Chinese foodstuffs in total 98 samples were taken which subsequently underwent laboratory testing.
Since September 2008 up to now only four cases of foodstuffs contaminated by melamine were revealed in the area of the CR, whether cases revealed by the CAFIA inspection were concerned, by internal control of food business operators themselves or by control of a supervision authority of another Member State which then informed CAFIA by means of the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed in the European Union. The public was informed about all these cases by media, even though for example only twenty 200 gram-packages of sweets were concerned.
None of the four contaminated foodstuffs on the Czech territory did not represent an urgent health risk for consumers; the measured values of melamine in these foodstuffs were many times lower than values measured in the Chinese milk nutrition which caused health problems to hundreds of thousands Chinese children. At the same time these contaminated foodstuffs (or raw materials) had been imported on the European market even before the preventive measures of the European Commission entered into force. The fact that since March 2009 no other foodstuff with exceeded limit of melamine was revealed in the CR, gives evidence about their efficiency.
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