On June 3, the official website of the General Administration of Customs of China updated 5 pieces of work information, announcing the suspension of import declarations for 16 overseas aquatic product manufacturers. The reason is that the packaging or product body samples of the cold chain food exported to China of these enterprises tested positive.
According to statistics, from May 27 to June 3, during the entry declaration process, the customs found that 15 batches of imported frozen aquatic products had positive nucleic acid test results. The sample types included internal and external packaging samples, product body samples, etc. The product list included frozen filefish, frozen squid, frozen ribbon fish, frozen yellow croaker, frozen basa fish, frozen vannamei shrimp, frozen cod and more.
Relatedly, China’s first annual monitoring report on swab samples of frozen food and its packaging, as well as environmental and worker samples, has been released.
Since July 2020, China has launched a nationwide program to systematically screen domestic or imported packaged frozen food for Covid-19 contamination.
From July 2020 to July 2021, swabs of frozen food-related samples were collected across China. Among the more than 55.83 million swabs investigated and monitored, more than 20.51 million swabs were used for cold chain food and packaging materials, and the rest were environmental and nasopharyngeal swabs. A total of 1,455 samples tested positive for the coronavirus nucleic acid, with a positive rate of 0.26/10,000.
Of the 1,450 positive samples, 96.41% (1398/1450) were food and food packaging materials, and 3.59% (52/1450) were environmental.
Among the 1398 positive food and food packaging materials, 99.5% were imported and 0.5% were domestic. Among the positive samples of food and packaging, the positive rates of food, inner packaging and outer packaging accounted for 18.60% (260/1398), 2.65% (37/1398) and 78.75% (1101/1398), respectively. In addition, the positive rates of the coronavirus in seafood, poultry and other foods were 53.86%, 37.91% and 8.23%, respectively. Therefore, aquatic products are the food with the highest risk of new coronavirus contamination, followed by poultry meat.
Regarding the 1391 positive imported cold chain food and food packaging samples, 46.66% came from 11 European countries, 27.50% from 6 South American countries, 16.04% from 9 Asian countries, 5.81% from 2 North American countries, and 3.99% from 2 African countries.
