Pork which fails to pass animal health agency inspections is found at a slaughterhouse in Tan Binh Distric, HCMC

Government officials have blamed animal health authorities for the mismanagement of the slaughter of animals for meat and trade of animal products in Ho Chi Minh City and Dong Nai Province.

Dong Nai Animal Health Agency manages 248 slaughter houses, of which a large number of the smaller operations failed to meet hygiene standards, Hai said.

He added that many markets in the province’s capital city of Bien Hoa sell meat that has not been tested for diseases and some vendors mix the tested meat with the untested.

Meanwhile only ten frozen meat retailers in HCMC could present food safety and hygiene certificates when the city Department of Agriculture and Rural Development ran random checks on 21 retailers, the department deputy head Nguyen Phuoc Trung told the conference.

In another incident reported by Thanh Nien, traffic police and food safety officials in the city on Tuesday stopped a public bus from Dong Nai on Hanoi Highway carrying one ton of meat violating animal hygiene regulation.

The Husbandry Department under the ministry said they recently inspected 41 animal feed producers in the north and south, and found that seven of them stored the feed in unsafe conditions.

The department also took 164 feed samples for testing and one of them was found to contain 1.6 times more lead than permitted while 31 samples were contaminated with E.coli and 15 with Aflatoxins that can lead to liver cancer.

Nine out of 129 vegetable samples tested by the ministry’s Plan Protection Department were also proven to contain higher amounts of toxins than permitted, the department said.

Phung Huu Hao, deputy head of the Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fishery Product Management, addressing the meeting said provincial and city animal health authorities were under-staffed and under-equipped to enforce food safety and hygiene standards at all the abattoirs and fines were too small to serve as a deterrent.

Hai of Dong Nai Province said better testing equipment was needed while his HCMC counterpart, Trung, called for better cooperation between animal health authorities of different cities and provinces to stop the cross trade of illegal meat.

Hao said the ministry in 2009 and 2010 would tackle the problem by checking retailers of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides, and ban the sale of untested meat.

HCMC Animal Health Agency early this month found 200 pigs with foot-and-mouth symptoms at a slaughter house in District 12. The pigs, which were brought from Dong Nai Province, were all destroyed.

On July 13, the agency officers found nearly 1.5 tons of goat penises being sold for human consumption. The penis was imported from Australia as food waste.

Around one week later, HCMC and neighboring Binh Duong Province agencies found hundreds of tons of outdated frozen meat on sale.

Reported by Quang Thuan