An outdoor eatery on a sidewalk in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1.

The responsible authorities of Ho Chi Minh City are not equipped with the managerial and technical skills to tackle the cooking safety and hygiene problem in the city, officials admitted at a meeting on Thursday.

The study revealed low percentages of health certified canteens for workers, students and patients and their minders at hospitals.

Nguyen Van Minh, deputy head of the board, said “health officials keep calling on people to maintain food safety but food at their hospitals is not clean or safe.”

Minh’s superior Nguyen Thi Bach Yen expressed doubts that mere certification can guarantee food’s safety.

The Go Vap Market in the district of the same name boasts many certificates because food stall employees are not required to undergo check-ups, Yen said.

The discussion heated up when the councilors mentioned several regulations that hinder health officials from blacklisting the sellers and producers of low quality food.

Regulations allow the city’s Preventive Health Center to test producers and sellers but not to punish them if they violate safety or hygiene standards.

The center, which is in charge of ensuring food safety and hygiene in the city, has to forward the case to the Health Department and instead of acting right away, the department would start inspections from the beginning.

Also, fruit and vegetable vendors are not required to stop selling their produce while samples have been taken for testing. Sometimes, by the time the test results are out, the products might have been sold out.

Officials from the city’s Department of Agriculture and Rural Development also admitted they have not managed to keep track of all the kinds of pesticides that farmers are using to grow fruits and vegetables.

Fruits and vegetables contain four kinds of toxins: pesticides, microorganisms, heavy metals and nitrates, but the department officials do not have the capability to test for the last three substances.

Although residents as well as officials are aware that various kinds of Chinese fruits are kept fresh using a toxic substance, both agriculture and health officials say they don’t know what chemical it is yet.

Health officials have also failed to set out clear solutions on controlling street food, and have found it hard to check the quality of some 70-80 percent of the fruit imported from nearby provinces.

Le Truong Giang, deputy head of the HCMC Health Department, said the department knows nothing of the quality of products like the herbal tea branded “Dr. Thanh” because it is produced and certified in Binh Duong Province.

“I even don’t know if ‘Dr.’ stands for doctor,” Giang said.

Another meeting on March 12 between councilors and health officials revealed that the latter had no explanation for more than half of 43 major food poisoning cases recorded over the past two years.

City health officials have been using education and awareness as one of the prime tools to promote food safety and hygiene, but the measure has not worked very well so far.

Councilor Tang Cam Vinh said many officials that he met during the two-month study “don’t know anything about food safety and hygiene.

“When I mentioned the topic to several market management officials in districts 3 and Go Vap, they looked at me as though they had just fallen from the sky.”

Deputy Nguyen Dang Nghia said reports on food safety and hygiene are made “carelessly only to prove that there are reports.”

The city’s Health Department has spent a lot of money talking to the public about food safety and hygiene but has not studied people’s views on the topic, which would make communication more effective.

Department official Huynh Le Thai Hoa apologized, saying that the department should have conducted a survey last year.

More than 1,600 people in the city had suffered from severe food poisoning last year, the Preventive Health Center reported earlier this month.

Mass food poisoning at local schools last year surged to seven incidents from two in 2007.

Sixty-seven percent of the city’s bottled water plants and 61 percent of ice-making plants failed hygiene inspections last year.

Also, 12 percent of the underground water used by the city locals last year didn’t meet safety standards. The figure was higher than that in 2007.

The health department director Nguyen Van Chau told the meeting that “it won’t be easy to establish an order for food safety and hygiene in the city.”

Source: TN, Agencies