Sausage with maggots must be destroyed: health agency
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The Health Department and the Food Safety and Hygiene Sub-Department in Binh Duong Province have forced a manufacturer to destroy all of its sausage products that had been found to contain maggots, even though they have not yet expired.
Representatives of the Jupiter Foods VN Joint Stock Company and some boxes of sausage containing maggots Photo: Tuoi Tre
Yesterday the Binh Duong Province Food Safety and Hygiene Sub-department met with the province-based Jupiter Foods VN Joint Stock Company about the sausage products contaminated with maggots that the company had recalled from its distributor, Van Kim Private Enterprise, in Dong Nai Province.
Thi Van Tai, Van Kim’s director, reported the case to the provincial Consumer Rights Protection Association and the sub-department on June 6 after he detected maggots in 140 cartons of sausage products he received from the company.
The sub-department later inspected the company and took two samples of sausage that was produced on February 23, 2012 for testing. The test results found no quality problems in the samples.
The sub-department said, “There is not enough ground to conclude that the maggots were caused by materials used in production or by contamination that might occur during production, packaging, transport or storage.”
Oai Wee Tat, general director of Jupiter Foods, asserted that his company was not at fault, since tests from an independent agency in Ho Chi Minh City also showed that the maggots were not produced from the sausage itself, but from winged insects that had penetrated the products from outside.
However, the sub-department said it was hard for insects to make their way into the product since every stick of sausage had been tightly wrapped, and they were put in plastic boxes before being placed into cartons.
The company explained that the products’ packaging might have been damaged or broken during handling or transportation by the agent, and insects could have accessed the sausage through tears in the packaging.
However, the company failed to show evidence for the alleged packaging damage caused by Van Kim.
Huynh Thanh Ha, deputy director of the provincial Health Department, said, “While waiting for competent agencies to come to an official conclusion about the contamination of the sausage, the manufacturer must destroy all products containing maggots.”
The destruction must be carried out in the presence of concerned agencies, Ha said.
Jupiter Foods VN Joint Stock Company is headquartered in Dong An 2 Industrial Park, Thu Dau Mot Town, Binh Duong Province.