AFP - Friday, October
24
TOKYO (AFP) - - Japan's Nissin Food Products Co. said
Friday it was recalling half a million cups of instant noodles over
fears of insecticide contamination in the latest food safety scare
to rock the country's consumers.
A 67-year-old woman vomited and felt numbness on her tongue
after eating Nissin's Cup Noodle this week in the Tokyo suburb of
Fujisawa, the city's health office said late Thursday.
The product was made at a Nissin factory in Japan. A series of
previous scares have involved food imported from China.
The health office said on inspecting the Cup Noodle they had
discovered paradichlorobenzene, the key chemical in bug repellent,
but no puncture or other abnormality in the cup.
Nissin was voluntarily recalling around 500,000 cups made on the
same factory line the same day, a company spokesman said.
They were sold at supermarkets in Tokyo and neighbouring areas
with most of them already gone from store shelves, he said.
"We apologise for causing trouble to Cup Noodle lovers," Nissin
president Susumu Nakagawa told reporters late Thursday.
However, he denied the possibility of contamination at the
factory, saying it had never used or stored the insecticide and had
seven security cameras watching manufacturing lines.
"It is unthinkable that the contamination occurred at our
production lines," he said.
The noodles scare spread Friday as another company, Myojo Foods
Co. of Tokyo, said it found instant noodles laced with
paradichlorobenzene and naphthol, also used as bug repellent.
A man "poured in hot water and noticed chemical smells," said a
health official in Yososuka, southwest of Tokyo. The man was unhurt
as he did not eat the noodles.
Nissin, based in the western Japan city of Osaka, created
instant ramen noodles as Japan's economy grew rapidly after World
War II. Aimed at busy people on the go, it has since become a
multibillion-dollar industry.
Japan has been on alert after a series of health scares
involving food, mostly made in China.
Earlier this month one woman fell sick after eating frozen green
beans imported from China, which were found to contain thousands of
times the permissible level of pesticide residue.
http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20081024/tap-japan-food-safety-noodle-d1078a1.html
