Before public concerns about the slow announcement of the causes and handling of food poisoning cases, on May 13, in an exchange with the press, Ms. Pham Khanh Phong Lan - Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Food Safety - said that the investigation, testing and completion of penalty dossiers must comply with many steps according to current legal regulations.
According to Ms. Lan, this makes it impossible to make a final conclusion in a short time, although functional agencies always want to have results soon to ensure deterrence and transparency.
Here, I also apologize to the community that to conclude whether a company providing meals caused food poisoning or not, and then issue a penalty, according to the current process, it takes quite a lot of time. I affirm that the penalty level is very heavy. If concluded to have caused food poisoning, businesses will be fined twice as much as individual business households, the amount can be up to hundreds of millions of VND. Not to mention there are additional penalties such as stopping the supply of meals. In fact, a company usually does not only supply to one school but can also to many different schools" - Ms. Lan said.
Ms. Lan said that food poisoning often causes immediate impact and creates great public concern. While the health sector prioritizes emergency care and treatment for patients, the investigation and handling of the food safety sector needs more time to fully implement professional steps.
Specifically, functional agencies must conduct an epidemiological investigation to determine the number of infected people in the total number of people who have used meals, and at the same time clarify which meal is the cause of the poisoning. Testing also takes time because it is necessary to carry out transplantation and incubation to determine if digestive disorders are caused by bacteria or not.
This is a mandatory procedure, no one can use any power to push for immediate results. In addition, it is necessary to test patients' specimens and many other related factors" - Ms. Lan said.
According to the Director of the Ho Chi Minh City Department of Food Safety, the most important factor to issue a penalty is to determine the injury rate, that is, the level of health impact of people using meals. However, this is not easy to do because in most cases, only abdominal pain occurs, and after taking medicine, it is stable, unlike other forms of injury that can be easily concluded.
Therefore, sometimes we are also passive, having to wait for conclusions from the health sector. I think that during the amendment of the Food Safety Law at the end of this year, we will propose solutions to make the handling process more urgent, meeting the legitimate needs of the people. Because when food poisoning occurs, everyone hopes to have conclusions and penalties soon to increase deterrence" - Ms. Lan added.
