Posted: February 16th, 2011 - 10:16pm
Source: China Daily

BEIJING - In the next five years, China's top health authority plans to make ensuring food safety into one of its "major health service projects", in a change meant to better protect the public from occasional food safety hazards.
Health Minister Chen Zhu made the remarks at a national conference on food safety and health inspection held in Wuxi, East China's Jiangsu province, according to a circular posted on the health ministry's website on Monday.
"Reducing and eliminating food-safety problems and related crimes is a long, arduous and complicated process," he said. "It needs enhanced coordination and cooperation among related departments like the Ministry of Health and the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine."
Making food safety into a goal of such projects would mean "more government spending for that purpose" and "more devotion to the task, particularly among local authorities", Wu Ming, a professor at Peking University's school of public health, told China Daily.