Bottled Oj Contains Fecal Bacteria

[Flashermac]

BANGKOK — Good news: Lab tests found orange juice confiscated from an illegal production ring last week was the real stuff after all, and not fake OJ as widely reported. The bad news? It contains bacteria commonly found in animal feces and therefore violates food safety laws.

 

And worse news: The Department of Medical Science ran the same tests on 12 other samples of OJ collected randomly from the Bangkok metropolitan area and found the same fecal bacteria in some of them.

 

“Sixty percent of our samples exceed the limit,†Apichai Mongkol, director of the Department of Medical Science, said Tuesday. “That means they aren’t clean enough. It’s also against the law, because the product didn’t meet the standards. It put the public at risk.â€

 

Four Vietnamese nationals were arrested on May 23 and accused of running the unauthorized juice operation in Saraburi province. The arrests led to renewed concerns over food safety in Thailand, where food poisoning can seem as common as som tum stalls.

 

Apichai said the test results of the OJ confiscated from the four suspects will be sent to health officials in Saraburi, who will in turn forward them to police for prosecution efforts. The Food and Drug Administration will go after those responsible for the failing samples in Bangkok, he added.

 

Although coliform bacteria does not generally pose any immediate risk to humans, they are an indicator that the production process was vulnerable to other dangerous diseases such as cholera.

 

“It doesn’t mean it would directly cause any diseases,†Apichai said. “But it means that if [the vendors] have cholera, consumers would have been infected. It’s an indirect indicator. We must prevent this at the beginning, instead of containing diseases after they already spread.â€

 

Apart from the unhealthy levels of coliforms, the OJ produced by the four Vietnamese in fact met safety standards; the saccharin, preservatives and artificial color the vendors put in the juice did not exceed the legal amount, he said.

 

The director also advised consumers to buy only FDA-approved foodstuffs marked with small parallelogram marks filled with serial numbers on the container.

 

Like this one.

 

“Whatever food didn’t receive FDA approval will have this kind of problem,†Apichai said. “If it won FDA approval, it was inspected, and the production is clean.â€

 

As for the four Vietnamese vendors whose OJ operation caused much panic on social media throughout last week, they are awaiting trial in prison, said Col. Samart Kaewmanee, commander of Muak Lek Police Station.

 

The four have been charged with illegally entering the country, taking up jobs restricted to Thai nationals and producing food without an FDA permit, he said.

 

Samart said he believed the juice made by the four suspects was from real oranges, because he saw piles of fruit at the production site, but it won’t help the suspects in the upcoming deportation process.

 

“They will be definitely deported,†he said.

 

He declined to say whether the four Vietnamese suspects were represented by any lawyers.

 

 

http://www.khaosoden...ate=06&section=

[Flashermac]

I wonder what the limit is on how much shit is allowed in our food.

[Coss]

Whilst I'm all for deporting random foreigners for what ever reason, why else would you have the concept of deportation otherwise?, fecal coliforms are not the villain that they're made out to be.

 

You know when your soap manufacturer says it's product kills 99.99% of all bacteria? Of the billions on your hands, that's still quite a lot left and some of those will be fecal coliforms.

 

There are something like 2 Kg of bacteria in your gut, some people have theirs washed out and replaced by a sample from a healthy person. This improves their health somewhat, I am told.

 

I reckon it's essential that you get bacteria in your diet to bolster the zoo that's in ya. If you were to have none, and not encounter any in your day to day life, when you did chance across some, you'd be unprepared and probably die if they were nasty ones.

 

But then again, if the OJ you've just bought from a dodgy looking Viet guy smells like shit, perhaps don't consume it...

[Specialist]

As I understand it, fecal coliform bacteria is not so much a problem in and of itself as it is an easy marker to tell whether the rest of the operation is clean enough.

[YimSiam]

LoS flies by the seat of its pants so often, I sometimes think it's amazing they are able to maintain major production lines for tech, vehicles, rice, etc. Why on earth would the inspector state that 'if vendors had cholera, customers would get cholera'?! Sure, it might be true that that could happen (presuming it's the vendors' shit in those bottles...), but it's a bizarre spectre to raise... Also, note to self: when inspecting juice, if you see fruit at the production site, the product is genuine...

 

Weird. Looks like someone wanted to clean out the foreign fruit product competition, and this is one step towards getting that done!