February 25, 2009
China to establish food safety body
China will set up a central food safety commission to help reduce the country's repeated scandals involving dangerous food products, state media said on Wednesday (Feb 25).
The commission will be supported by the State Council and will be introduced under a new food safety law to be put to the annual parliamentary session next month, Xinhua news agency said.
The report added that the commission's task would be ''to strengthen the country's food monitoring system, whose low efficiency has long been blamed for repeated food scandals''.
China's huge and loosely regulated food industry is regularly slap with unsafe food scandals that harm public health and result in product recalls both at home and abroad.
Last year, milk products tainted by melamine, which was added to falsify protein test results, were linked to the deaths of at least six infants and illnesses of nearly 300,000 others.
