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Authorities call foul on infected US chicken
( 2002-01-10 00:10 ) (1 )

Quarantine officials in South China said Wednesday they expected to destroy 24 tons of bacteria-infected chicken imported from the United States.

The detention of the poultry on Monday marked the second time in a month that authorities in Huizhou in Guangdong Province had detected E. coli O157 in US frozen chicken.

Local quarantine officials said Wednesday they expected to destroy the chicken after notifying the US exporter.

On December 11, the E. coli bug was found in 24 tons of frozen chicken shipped from Atlanta in the southern US state of Georgia with the registration code P-19378. Local authorities immediately burned and buried the tainted chicken.

The two cases belong to the same batch of US chicken products, according to Guangdong quarantine officials.

After last December's case, the State General Administration for Quality Supervision and Inspection and Quarantine notified the United States and suspended the import of US frozen chicken with the registration code P-19378.

But officials at the US Embassy in Beijing said Wednesday they had received no official response from the US Government and had no comment on either of the two cases.

Local quarantine authorities said they had contacted the US exporter -- whom they did not name -- but the US side has yet to make a decision.

Tan Zhanglong, a division chief of the Huizhou Quarantine Bureau, repeated his remarks of previous weeks when he said that the temporary ban on imports of US frozen chicken would not affect other US poultry exports to China.

In another recent case, the municipal government of Zhuhai,also in Guangdong Province, buried 40 tons of chicken wing tips from Brazil reported to be infected with roup, an infectious disease that may quickly spread among animals as well as human beings.

US fast food giants McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) said that, in their Chinese shops, they used locally raised chicken, which was much cheaper than imported products.

The bacterium E. coli O157:H7 leads to severe diarrhoea and occasionally kidney failure.

It killed 12 people and affected more than 10,000 in Japan in 1996, said Chinese quarantine experts.

During the first eight months of last year, 9,540 tons of chicken were imported via Shanghai port alone, according to statistics from Chinese customs authorities.

(China Daily by Zhang Yong)