Cod's off the shelves amid health scare over oilfish
The oilfish scare has widened, forcing a supermarket chain and a fast food chain to stop selling cod.
The alarm was raised last week when the Centre for Food Safety reported that over the past six months 14 people had developed diarrhoea after eating oilfish sold as cod by the ParknShop chain.
On Friday centre staff met representatives of wholesalers, retailers and caterers, who agreed to halt sales of oilfish, which has been mislabelled as cod.
The manager of a Fairwood branch in Fanling Town Centre said yesterday the chain was no longer serving cod to reassure patrons who feared they might be given oilfish.
'We only sold genuine cod fish,' said the manager, who declined to be named. 'We have never bought or sold oilfish. Since Thursday, all our branches have withdrawn cod from the menu, in the wake of this incident.'
He was responding to a caller who told a Commercial Radio phone-in programme yesterday that she had suffered from diarrhoea for a week last month after eating tomato cod and rice at the Fanling branch.
Simon Wong Ka-wo, chairman of the Hong Kong Federation of Restaurants and Related Trades, was not surprised by the scare.
'Oilfish is often sold as cod because the wholesale price is at least 30 per cent cheaper,' he said.
