Drugs found in Taiwan dairy products

Popular brands of milk and dairy products sold in Taiwan have been found to contain antibiotics, plasticizer, estrogen, tranquilizers and painkillers.

The Taiwan-based Business Weekly magazine bought samples of Uni-President, Weichuan, Kuangquan and Taiwan Bifido products and asked Chen Liang-yu, a professor of biotechnology at Ming Chuan University, to test them for drug residue.

All samples were found to contain antibiotics and traces of dibutyl phthalate, a plasticizer. Estrogen, tranquilizers and painkillers were detected in some of the samples.

The dairy producers told the magazine that their products had passed local authority checks.

They said the drugs involved were not on a check list and the government didn't specify limits for them.

None of the products involved in the tests are on sale in Shanghai, city officials said.

Gu Zhenhua, vice director of the Shanghai Food Safety Office, said: "Dairy products with excessive antibiotics are found sporadically during regular checks in the city. The excessive antibiotics residue could be because farmers sold milk produced during the drug holiday."

He said farmers can use legal antibiotics on their cows, but their milk can't be sold while they are being medicated or during the "drug holiday" period — the time it takes for the drugs to be eliminated from the body after medication ends.

"The detected drug reported by the Taiwan magazine may be residue which hadn't faded out of the body," Gu said. "We didn't find serious problems in previous checks."

Gu said dairy products were not the main target in testing for plasticizer. "Oil and liquor are the usual targets for plasticizer checks, as their packages are usually made of plastic and the storage and use period is long enough to allow for plasticizer leaking," he said.

For estrogen, there may be certain levels naturally present but adding the hormone on purpose is prohibited.