Wave of health scares takes pleasure out of eating

Eating in Hong Kong is often touted as one of the more pleasurable experiences of visiting or living here. But, in the last 12 months, diners may have felt they were playing roulette with their health each time they swallowed a mouthful.

Few foodstuffs escaped untarnished with about 200 people being hospitalised for food poisoning.

Pesticide poisoning is a common hazard of eating mainland vegetables and, in November, three people fell ill after eating Chinese chrysanthemums. Within days, another 11 people were sick.

As Christmas loomed, even a certain ice-cream was off the menu. About 115 tonnes of Dreyers ice- cream was dumped in Government landfills after the Listeria monocytogenes bacteria was found in samples of CookiesnCream bars. The bacteria causes illness and can result in stillbirth. The fault was tracked to a plant in the United States and, following an investigation and reports, a bacteria- free Dreyers supply resumed.

An outbreak of bird flu swept fresh chicken from the dinner table in December. Thousands of chickens were slaughtered in to attempt to contain the virus. However, it was months before chicken supplies from approved mainland farms could resume and stringent new food hygiene laws were in place.

In February, a strain of potentially fatal E-coli was found in beef samples from a meat shop at Shek Wu Hui market, Sheung Shui, and traced by health officials to a private slaughterhouse in Yuen Long. Seminars were held to teach abattoir workers how to handle beef to prevent contamination.

Cholera - which last broke out in large numbers four years ago - struck again in March. A dozen people were infected in the first three months of this year, almost the total for last year. The outbreak was traced to the Tao Heung Seafood Restaurant in Causeway Bay. The Government temporarily shut it down, ordered tests on all staff and destroyed rats and cockroaches on the premises.