Actively promote third-party testing

In the context of growing concerns about food safety issues, people’s awareness of food safety testing is also increasing, but how can food safety testing be affordable to ordinary consumers?

The government work report pointed out that “accelerate the reform of the food and drug safety supervision system, improve the unified and authoritative regulatory agencies, strengthen supervision capabilities, inspection and inspection capabilities, and information construction, and continue to carry out special food and drug treatment.”

"I suspect there is a problem with the powdered milk I bought. I would like to find a department to test it. I can find several departments that either don't give personal test or say that the test can't be done. There are two or three thousand to detect." Ms. Li, a local resident, recently found a dealer because she was worried that her child had eaten “problem milk powder”. “After they contacted the manufacturers, they said that they let me send the milk powder to them for testing.”

This made Ms. Li’s idea of ​​her own test, but Ms. Li quickly found out, “Ask a hospital hospital to say that there is no way to detect it, and look for quality supervision and industrial and commercial administration. They all say that they cannot detect.”

Later, Ms. Li heard that there was an inspection and quarantine bureau in Qingdao that could be tested, but the cost was two to three thousand yuan. She could only give up.

“Now food safety inspection agencies are indeed more dispersed.” Zhao Changfeng, deputy director of the Institute of Nutrition and Food Hygiene at the School of Public Health of Shandong University, said that most testing organizations do not accept personal testing applications, and even if they are accepted, they are expensive.

Zhao Changfeng said that once statistics were collected, only the inspection of all pesticide residues in leeks would cost 5,000 yuan, which is unbearable to ordinary consumers.

"As consumers' awareness of food safety increases, the number of samples submitted by individuals will increase," said Zhao Changfeng. "The high price is not conducive to guiding more consumers to participate in food safety supervision."

For the high inspection fees, Zhao Changfeng analyzed that this is because the current inspection and testing institutions lack competition and “in the absence of competition, prices will definitely be high.” He suggested that inspection organizations with government background should be integrated into a unified authority testing platform. At the same time, we encourage social capital to develop third-party testing platforms.

At the newly convened food and drug safety work conference in the province, Vice Governor Wang Sui-lian stated that inspection and testing capability is an important support for food safety supervision. At the same time, she also admitted that the lack of third-party testing agencies can easily affect the credibility of the test results.

According to reports, the provincial food inspection and inspection technology equipment and personnel have all been transferred to the Provincial Food and Drug Inspection Institute, and successfully completed the organization qualification and testing expansion. The 21 county-level drug inspection agencies in the province completed the task of standardized construction.

“In the past, different departments randomly sampled themselves, and this may be both duplicated and may be missed.” Wang Suilian said, the city's supervisory departments should implement sampling inspection “three unifications”.

It is understood that the number of third-party food safety third-party testing agencies in our province is indeed limited. Only Qingdao has developed well and there are more than 20 third-party testing organizations.