VietNamNet Bridge - According to the Environment Police Agency, Vietnam is one of the countries with the highest rate of morbidity and mortality from cancer in the world. Recent studies show that 70 percent of cancer cases in the country are due to unsafe diet.

Rotten squids imported from China.

With dozens of years experience in investigating food safety cases, Colonel Tran Trong Binh - Deputy Director of the Environment Police Agency said that food hygiene-related violations in Vietnam are very complicated, serious and directly affect the health and life of people today.

Binh cited figures from a seminar on cancer prevention organized by the Health Ministry that Vietnam has 240,000-250,000 cancer patients, and each year it has about 100,000 new cases.

Notably, the rate of death from cancers in Vietnam is up to 73.5 percent (about 82,000 cases) – turning Vietnam into one of the countries with highest mortality rates by cancer in the world.

The number of group food poisoning cases in Vietnam is on the rise. Statistics of the Food Safety Department of the Health Ministry show that the number of cases, patients and death caused by food poisoning increases year on year.

Colonel Binh cited independent research works that 70 percent of cancer cases are caused by unsafe diet, mainly from the use of polluted water resources and contaminated food sources; 20-25 percent due to poor living environment and living conditions, 5-10 percent by hereditary.

Besides using toxic chemicals to preserve food, to enhance the color, flavor and to cut down production cost, the environment police have recently uncovered a lot of tricks that poison consumers in Vietnam.

The police said that in the last one year, taking advantage of the temporary import for re-export of frozen food (internal organs, animal products, poultry), tainted products slip into the local market.

According to Colonel Tran Quang Vinh - Chief of Hai Phong City Environment Police Agency – there was a time that the Hai Phong Port had up to 1,800 containers of frozen foods originating from the Americas, waiting to be exported to China.

Some containers were at the port for over two months. The food smelled and decomposed.

Vinh said, of the 25 companies that are specialized in temporary import for re-export of food via the port of Hai Phong, some colluded with partners to bring poor quality and expired food into Vietnam.

ANTD