China clamps down on frozen food for fear of coronavirus

After testing positive for frozen Argentine meat, German pork and Indian cuttlefish virus, China is cracking down on cold chain goods to prevent any outbreak of Covid-19 after packaging.

China’s cities, the world’s largest importers of beef and pork, have pledged to strengthen import screening and sterilization.

In the north-eastern city of Tianjin, one of the country’s largest ports, the latest campaign to protect China’s borders against the reproduction of the Covid-19 began after authorities last week tied up a worker’s warehouse infection to stabilize pig imports from Germany. .

In the following days, food packaging was tested positive for coronavirus in cities ranging from East Jinning to South Ximan and Central Zhengzhou.

The Shanghai municipal government said it would begin testing goods in supermarkets and warehouses as part of emergency measures to ensure the safety of stationary goods. The advertisement will feature Argentine meat, Ecuadorian shrimp and Indonesian fish.

Beijing also launched a nationwide effort to disinfect and detect cold chain imports. According to the rules, a single positive SARS-CoV-2 test, the virus that causes Covid-19, could cause the company’s goods to be suspended for a week, while three positive tests could result in a one-month suspension.

Germany has denied claims made by Tianjin officials about the source of the infection. A spokesman for the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture, Deutsche Welle, told broadcaster that although transmission was theoretically possible, there were “no known cases of SARS-Cove-2 infection”. . . Contact with contaminated meat products or surfaces ”.

Siddharth Sridhar of the Department of Microbiology at the University of Hong Kong said: “It is important to have a sense of perspective. Most transmissions are caused by infecting a person through air transport. “

He said there was a risk of being infected with a theoretical “non-zero” virus that spreads from a cold surface, but there were no clear examples of how it could spread.

But public health officials in China are adamant that cold chain transport poses serious risks of infection. Despite the large-scale control of the virus in the country since March, national leaders have repeatedly warned local officials to be vigilant against the re-emergence of Kovid-19.

The bid for complete elimination has led to a zero-tolerance approach. Small clusters of infections have been found from severe lockdowns and citywide test drives.

While experts continue to discuss the need for China’s resource-intensive efforts to reduce the risk of outbreaks from frozen foods, some research has backed up Beijing’s claims about transmission risks.

An August paper, led by Dale Fisher, an infectious disease specialist at National University Hospital in Singapore, found that a frozen diet could spread the disease to as many areas as possible where the disease is under control.

The authors of the paper, whose peers have not been reviewed, discovered that SARS-Cove-2 can survive refrigeration or freezing on pork, salmon and chicken cubes. They did not do the same test for packaging.

“We believe that contaminated imported food can transmit the virus to workers,” the authors wrote. “A new outbreak index case is likely to occur in an infected food handler.”