By Lee Kyung-min
The government has failed to oversee whether eggs were properly coded to identify which out of 17 provincial areas they came from, over the last seven years, data showed Sunday.
The oversight is further enraging the public over food safety following a government inspection that found insecticide-tainted eggs had wrong coding on them or had no coding at all. The eggs were mostly contaminated with either fipronil or bifenthrin, both of which are insecticides used to kill pest infestations.
Under related regulations set up in 2010, distributors who buy eggs from farmers, should code every egg to track the distribution process to help ensure consumers know where they came from. Farmers that distribute eggs themselves must also comply with the regulation.
First-time violators are punished with a verbal warning, second-time and third-time violators with a seven-day and 15-day suspension of business operations, respectively.
However, data from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety showed no record of punishment on six violators between 2015 and 2016. There is no record of government inspection reports on egg farms or distributors since 2010.
At a joint briefing by the drug safety and agriculture ministries, Friday, officials drew criticism as they failed to clarify which ministry should be held accountable for the negligence, which reporters blasted as essentially “non-existent” enforcement of regulations.
Criticism against ministry officials further spiked after they tried to shift the blame to the provincial governments claiming officials there failed to conduct proper on-site inspections.
The food safety ministry will announce its findings today on how much of a health risk is posed to those who have eaten the contaminated eggs.
The ministry will disclose the largest amount of harmful insecticide found in a single egg and the possible health risks to those who have eaten many contaminated eggs over an extended period of time.
People favor eggs as they are cheap and have nutritional value _ high in protein _ that is beneficial to those on diets.
Meanwhile, a group of doctors said Friday that the maximum level detected in a single egg was not enough to cause panic.
Hong Yoon-chul, a Seoul National University physician specializing in preventative medicine, said that the maximum level of fipronil or bifenthrin detected so far was not significant enough to cause acute toxicity to people.
He also said that if a one-year-old ate two contaminated eggs, the amount of contaminant consumed would be less than 20 percent of the maximum permissible level, adding that parents need not worry too much.
Baek Hyun-wook, a physician at Bundang Jesaeng Hospital specializing in clinical nutritional science, said more than 90 percent of harmful substances found in eggs thus far are removed by the body within a week, noting that they do not stay in people’s systems.
Earlier, the ministry said 49 farms sold eggs that were so contaminated with high levels of harmful chemicals that they should have been banned from being sold.
They were among 86 farms with eggs contaminated even with permissible levels of insecticides. The results were drawn up after the two ministries inspected 1,239 farms including 683 organic farms and 556 non-organic ones.