Milk powder starving babies to death; toxic liquor leaving 11 dead and more than 50 in hospital; canned lychees poisoning fruit lovers; green bean vermicelli loaded with carcinogens; tainted bean shoots; and peanuts harbouring a liver-cancer causing toxin. These are just a few of the food -safety disasters reported from China in the past month.
Are we facing a full-scale food industry disaster, or are we just hearing more about these scandals because the central government is determined to clean up China's heavily polluted food industry?
It is probably a bit of both. China's food industry has recently undergone a massive growth spurt, to become a major supplier of foodstuffs to the world. At the same time, China has joined the WTO and has signed food safety agreements with other major governments, making cleaning up the system an urgent task.
But fingers should not be pointed at China alone. The entire world is suffering greater and greater problems not just feeding itself, but feeding itself with uncontaminated, safe food products. Twenty years ago, we worried about our food supply running out. Now, for many nations the greatest worry is not that we will not get enough, but that what we do get will harm, or even kill, us.
A conference on food safety in the Asia-Pacific, hosted jointly by the Food and Agricultural Organisation and World Health Organisation in Malaysia last month, was told that "in industrialised countries, 30 per cent of the people are affected by food-borne diseases annually".
Given our great technological advances of the last 30 years, why do we seem to be so much worse at putting safe and healthy food on our tables? The food safety conference was told that the culprit is the very technology, and other advances, that have enabled rapid globalisation.
"The factors contributing ... were globalisation of the food supply, advances in food production and processing technologies, changes in agricultural and animal husbandry practices, demographic changes and changes in lifestyle," according to one report.
As if that was not depressing enough, there was more bad news: we do not actually know how bad the situation really is. "The true dimension of the burden of food-borne diseases is still unknown, as a result of poor documentation and absence of reliable data - thus limiting our understanding of its public health importance and impeding our efforts to secure the resources and support necessary for effective control of food-borne diseases," the report said.
So what can we all do about it? Run away to New Zealand, buy up the last few pristine acres on this earth and grow our own food? The food safety conference was not all bad news. A number of countries, including some in our own region, have set up successful monitoring systems - a crucial first step. Sars and avian flu have had this one benefit: governments around the region, including our own, now recognise that early warnings and early action are the best way to prevent large-scale food disasters.
Australia established a system called OzFoodNet in 2000. It is a collaborative system where state, territorial and national health authorities share information on causes, rates and cases of food-borne diseases, to understand the true scope of food problems in Australia.
Vietnam, one of the hardest-hit countries during the recent avian flu outbreak, is currently studying ways to improve its ability to detect food -borne illness early.
The avian flu outbreak was first detected because the Pasteur Institute, set up by the French during colonial times, still has a strong commitment to surveillance.
It is a commitment most other countries and systems forgot about, thinking that technology had bypassed the need to do the simple things. It looks as if it is time to go back to basics.
Margaret Cheng is a Hong Kong-based medical writerSouth China Morning Post:
