Posts Tagged ‘poison’

Tea Bottles Laced With Weedkiller

Just days after a bottle of green tea sold at a supermarket in Tokyo was found to contain herbicide, a similar incident involving the exact same chemical has occurred in Hyogo Prefecture:

The bottle in question was one of a batch of about 330,000 produced on Jan. 23 at the Coca-Cola West Products Co. factory in Akashi in the prefecture, and had a sell-by date of Nov. 9 of this year.

The Hyogo prefectural police detected glyphosate–which is a component of a herbicide used widely in the nation and causes diarrhea and vomiting when consumed–in the tea after examining the bottle’s remaining contents.

Suspecting the substance might have been deliberately added to the tea, the police are investigating possible forcible obstruction of business and causing bodily injury.

In both cases it was determined that other bottles of the same tea did not contain any herbicide, and in the bottle found in Tokyo is said to have had a loose bottle cap. It doesn’t look to be a question of unsafe practices by the manufacturers, so no product recalls have been issued.

Some Chinese-made Dumplings Contain Insecticide: Panic Begins

After eating some gyoza for lunch today, I returned to my apartment to find that today’s top news story was about insecticide-tainted Chinese gyoza [not the brand of gyoza I ate today, thankfully]:

Five family members in Ichikawa, Chiba, were taken to hospital suffering from vomiting and diarrhea after they ate the dumplings, while another two women from Chiba and three family members from Takasago, Hyogo Prefecture, also reportedly ate the dumplings.

One of the family members from Ichikawa, a 5-year-old girl, was left unconscious in serious condition, while the other family members fell seriously ill after eating the dumplings, which were sold frozen through a consumer cooperative.

A survey by the Ichikawa public health center detected the insecticide methamidophos in the dumplings in levels that far exceeded normal standards. Police are investigating the incident, and are considering forming a case on suspicion of attempted murder.

Today is probably not a good day to be a company that sells Chinese-made frozen foods in Japan, as this incident will probably add to the growing perception in Japan that Chinese food imports are not safe.

Update: The Chinese are investigating these reports, and the story continues to dominate news coverage today.