6 defendants in this case have been prosecuted, but what makes public opinion worried is where this meat has gone and how many people have accidentally become victims of greed.
More than 250 tons of dirty meat is a very large number, showing that this is an organized line. To bring a huge amount of sick pigs through many localities, transferring them by many means, gathering at slaughterhouses and then distributing them to the market for many months in a row, it is certainly not an impulsive act of a few individuals.
What is even more condemnable is that those involved in this ring understand very well what they are doing. They know that the pigs show signs of disease, know that the purchase price is cheap because the pigs are infected, know that the law prohibits slaughtering and consuming diseased animals. But for profit, everything is still turned into pieces of meat appearing on people's trays.
Here, there is not only fraud in business but also a trade-off of public health for money.
Although African swine fever has not yet been proven to be transmitted to humans, slaughtering and consuming infected animals is prohibited by law.
Consumers cannot know where the meat they buy comes from when it has been chopbed, sold at the market or put into kitchens. What they buy is trust, but what they receive may be insecurity.
Each case of unsafe food being discovered leaves behind much greater consequences than the value of the seized shipment.
That is the consumer's skepticism about the food market. That is the damage of livestock households, slaughterhouses and legitimate businesses when they have to endure the same unsympathetic view from society.
And that is also the risk of reducing the effectiveness of the entire disease prevention and control system on livestock that the State has spent a lot of resources to build.
The case in Quang Tri also raises an unavoidable question: why could such a large number of sick pigs be transported through many provinces, put into slaughterhouses and consumed for many months without being detected earlier?
This case also shows that if only waiting until there is a special case or catching them red-handed, the task of preventing dirty food from entering the market by functional agencies is always in a passive position.
What is more needed is a strict monitoring mechanism right from the stages of transportation, quarantine, slaughter to circulation in the market.
Technology for tracing origin, electronic quarantine data or regular coordination between veterinary forces, market management and police needs to be promoted more strongly and regularly.
Finally, equally important is to handle the consumption line to the end. If you only arrest the transporter or the slaughterhouse owner and ignore the distribution points, those who know the origin of goods but still consume them to make a profit, it will be very difficult to prevent similar cases from recurring.
Dirty food is not a common administrative violation. It is an act of directly infringing upon people's right to health protection, causing damage to social trust.
Therefore, what people expect after this case is not only harsh sentences for the defendants, but also strong enough solutions so that similar lines no longer have the opportunity to exist.
