While appreciating the recent crackdown against rotten meat and poultry, the concerned agencies should also gear up to check other food items like milk and spices which are every day used in every household. As per the doctors, presence of a simple chemical ‘oxytocin’ – although a banned drug, but which is usually given to cattle to increase their lactation, seeps easily into the human body through milk that people consume. There it could easily translate into hormonal imbalances, resulting in miscarriage among pregnant women, as well as eye and other problems among the newborns. It also leads to certain heart and neurological complications. Here it is not only the oxytocin, but even dangerous detergents and urea have been found in milk samples, and industrial dyes and synthetic colours and a whole lot of other dangerous chemicals have been found in so many other edibles, but no substantive action against the adulterers has come about from the concerned agencies. Just announcing that so many quintals of rotten meat were recovered is not the solution to the problem. People need to know wherefrom this meat had come and where it was supposed to be sold.
While the people involved in this trade should be named and shamed and should be booked under Public Safety Act as they are poisoning the masses here, those in the government, assigned with the duty of ensuring food safety should also be held accountable. This dirty trade, as indications are there, has been going on from so many years, as admitted by the Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah the other day while chairing a high level meeting to review the ongoing food safety enforcement campaign in the wake of recent seizures of unsafe meat and meat products, particularly in the Kashmir Valley. CM told the meeting, “The grave problem appears to have remained unchecked and unnoticed for too long. The unscrupulous elements have played with health and lives of people. This has to stop and those deliberately involved in playing with public health must face the law”.
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While appreciating CM’s assertion regarding the unscrupulous elements facing the law, what about those under whose very noses, this trade has been going on for so many years. It would be naïve to assume that none among the concerned authorities had no clue about it. Those who are in the trade genuinely have been raising the questions frequently that this unchecked entry of meat and poultry has been impacting their businesses but the authorities didn’t act to check. So, while the culprits should be booked under relevant laws, an enquiry should be conducted to find out the criminal-official nexus. Reforms in the concerned government agency are to be priorotized and food test labs to be established at every district.
