Drive against food adulteration is overdue
Tuesday, 19 May 2009
Ifteqarul Alam
DOCTORS in Thailand's famous Bamnrungrad hospital which is the favourite destination of Bangladeshi patients, was reported by one of our major Bangla dailies to have said the patients came to the south east Asian state from their regular consumption of toxic and spurious foodstuffs in their country. The same daily furthermore noted in one of its recent reports that the doctors there also expressed their worry that a large number of the patients were young ones whose fertility or sperm counts seemed decreased from regular consumption of such foods. As a consequence, they will also be prone to becoming parents of disfigured and diseased infants. There is no need to explain the great health and productivity threat looming over the country's population from unabated consumption of such adulterated and sub standard foods.
The Consumer Association of Bangladesh (CAB) sometime ago released the results of its findings about the extent of adulteration of food items in the country. Its findings were shocking to say the least. It disclosed that after thorough testing, 16 out of 18 popular brands of powder and pasteurized milk in Bangladesh were found to be substandard. The real description of a short list of foods would make any health conscious person shudder at the thought of what they have been consuming in this country: fish and milk with formalin in them which is used to keep human corpses fresh but which, on entering human bodies, can produce lethal effects such as cancer and liver diseases; burnt mobil in cooking oil, pesticides with toxic effects sprayed liberally on fruits and vegetables, colours in foods which are really dyes used in textile industries and can severely undermine human health, urea used in 'muri' (puffed rice) for frying to make the same look shinier, adulteration of chilli and turmeric powders with brick dust, serving rotten eggs and meat in restaurants, marketing of fish bred in sewer lagoons which means such fish ingest different lethal bacteria from human excrement and these get passed on to new human victims, calcium carbide, used for artificial fruit ripening that can produce a host of diseases.
The list can be made longer which is not possible within the limits of this column. But it should be enough to give an idea of what sorts of poisons are being served in abundance in the daily foods of millions and millions of Bangladeshis and their paying an awful price in the form of various sicknesses.
The imperative is immediate resumption on a regular and sustainable basis, of the sort of hard drive against such food adulteration that was noted some years ago.
DOCTORS in Thailand's famous Bamnrungrad hospital which is the favourite destination of Bangladeshi patients, was reported by one of our major Bangla dailies to have said the patients came to the south east Asian state from their regular consumption of toxic and spurious foodstuffs in their country. The same daily furthermore noted in one of its recent reports that the doctors there also expressed their worry that a large number of the patients were young ones whose fertility or sperm counts seemed decreased from regular consumption of such foods. As a consequence, they will also be prone to becoming parents of disfigured and diseased infants. There is no need to explain the great health and productivity threat looming over the country's population from unabated consumption of such adulterated and sub standard foods.
The Consumer Association of Bangladesh (CAB) sometime ago released the results of its findings about the extent of adulteration of food items in the country. Its findings were shocking to say the least. It disclosed that after thorough testing, 16 out of 18 popular brands of powder and pasteurized milk in Bangladesh were found to be substandard. The real description of a short list of foods would make any health conscious person shudder at the thought of what they have been consuming in this country: fish and milk with formalin in them which is used to keep human corpses fresh but which, on entering human bodies, can produce lethal effects such as cancer and liver diseases; burnt mobil in cooking oil, pesticides with toxic effects sprayed liberally on fruits and vegetables, colours in foods which are really dyes used in textile industries and can severely undermine human health, urea used in 'muri' (puffed rice) for frying to make the same look shinier, adulteration of chilli and turmeric powders with brick dust, serving rotten eggs and meat in restaurants, marketing of fish bred in sewer lagoons which means such fish ingest different lethal bacteria from human excrement and these get passed on to new human victims, calcium carbide, used for artificial fruit ripening that can produce a host of diseases.
The list can be made longer which is not possible within the limits of this column. But it should be enough to give an idea of what sorts of poisons are being served in abundance in the daily foods of millions and millions of Bangladeshis and their paying an awful price in the form of various sicknesses.
The imperative is immediate resumption on a regular and sustainable basis, of the sort of hard drive against such food adulteration that was noted some years ago.