No eggs, milk, fish or veggies and no kinky sex either – how are we to survive?

...and just to continue the food saga that is ongoing in China at the present moment and probably has been for some time in the past.
Early last week authorities in Wuxi confirmed that fish sold at a local wet market were contaminated with high levels of formaldehyde. This was done in order to preserve the whitebait

Then later in the same week China extended sympathy over a Japanese consumer's sickness caused by eating China-made frozen green beans. According to Japanese media, a woman fell ill after eating the beans produced by a company in Yantai, she experienced numbness in her mouth after eating the beans and health authorities discovered organophosphate pesticides in the product.

So now it looks as though we will need to resort to eating only Pringle chips, but even that has the danger of causing high cholesterol so what to do next? One cannot live on drinking water and breathing air alone, without even the slightest possibility of a spiced up sex life with chocolate body paints (see previous comments)!

No more egg nog, no more omelettes?

Following the recent milk scare in China, Hong Kong's Centre for Food Safety announced this last weekend that some eggs produced in northeast China (Dalian) contained unacceptable (but lower range) limits of melamine, as allowed by the HK authorities. They have also said that a 10-kg or three-year-old child would have to eat 24 of the eggs and a 60-kg adult 283 eggs to reach their daily tolerable intake of the chemical. Happy eating!

A food safety official in Dalian city near where the tainted Hong Kong eggs were produced said melamine had been detected in eggs last month. The tainted eggs were destroyed and eggs were checked in September and again in October, and no melamine was found. Since then there has been mention of another few brands of eggs in China that were found to be contaminated with melamine.

The media has reported that an important brand of eggs supplied by China's Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group, and suspected of being tainted with melamine, was pulled from shelves of a major retailer in China earlier this week. It should be emphasized that this was done as a precautionary measure and that the products had not yet been found to be contaminated.

At this stage no one knows how much melamine is absorbed into raw foods like meat and vegetables, although animal tests in the United States concluded in 2007 that consuming "pork, chicken, fish and eggs from animals that had inadvertently been fed animal feed contaminated with melamine ... was very unlikely to pose a human health risk". It is improbable that there would be any issues if melamine is consumed in small amounts either from foods with dairy as a minor ingredient and/or where the food is consumed in small and infrequent amounts.

If consumed in higher quantities over a long period melamine may, in some individuals, cause health problems such as kidney stones or kidney disease. The reason why infants in China were particularly affected is that they were consuming significant amounts of contaminated milk formula on a daily basis. To date there has been no evidence that this current scare has been responsible for any medical issues, and foods with potentially low levels of melamine, such as eggs, biscuits, candies etc., are more likely to be infrequently consumed and in smaller amounts; as such they are not considered high-risk foods for dietary exposure to melamine.

Let common sense prevail when shoppping and eating and put everything into perspective as you are unlikely to survive either on marginally contaminated air and water alone.

Melamine Now in Sex Paint - What Next?

In the last few days I have been dealing with more enquiries on the Chinese melamine issue which has reared its head again, but this puts a whole new perspective on the subject! Now a chocolate-flavoured body sex paint has been recalled from Australian shelves and has caused consternation in the UK as well as the result of melamine contamination!

The paint, Boxer Lovers Body Pen Set, today joined the banned list alongside six other products in Australia.

The body paint's importer has voluntarily withdrawn the product and Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) spokeswoman Lydia Buchtmann said those who had consumed the body paint product were not likely to be affected unless large quantities were consumed.

Would have to be a sexfest orgy to consume enough of this to get close to any toxic levels, but you could have enormous fun for the remainder of your life and still survive the melamine - maybe not as a result of the other associated ‘side-effects’ when using the paint! You have a greater chance of dying of exhaustion from all the hanky-panky.

Just be careful of lead and mercury or other toxic substances when indulging in this kind of play, after all toys are toys!

Plane Gets Passenger Power

From the front page of South African Sunday Times Sept 28 2008:
How lovely and welcome to life in China!

Coming down to earth with a bang took on a new meaning for 69 Chinese passengers this week - they were asked to disembark and help push their stranded plane, The Shandong Airlines aircraft broke down before it taxied to the passenger terminal at Zhengzhou Airport. Staff tried to push the aircraft but it would not budge. With the added muscle of the passengers, it took almost two hours to push the plane to a taxi way.

What happened to a good old motorised tow?

As usual nothing fails to amaze me!