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SFH on buyout scheme for live poultry trade and dairy products incidents
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     Following is the transcript of remarks made by the Secretary for Food and Health, Dr York Chow, at a stand-up media session in the West Wing lobby of Central Government Offices today (September 25):

Reporter: (about the effectiveness of the buyout scheme)

Secretary for Food and Health: Our main policy is to ensure that there is no live poultry staying overnight in our markets.  This ex-gratia payment scheme is mainly to deal with the traders that cannot survive with this particular policy.  About 70% of the trade have decided to take up the scheme now.  About 30% of the retailers and about 50% of the local farms remain.  With the adjustment in the import of Mainland live chickens, I think we are able to maintain a certain level of supply of live chickens and at the same time ensure that those chickens are being slaughtered in a much more hygienic and better environment.  In controlling avian influenza, this is an effective policy (no overnight stocking of live poultry at retail level) which is able to continue for some time.  As I have said many times, we need to ensure segregation between humans and poultry eventually and some sort of centralised poultry slaughtering plant is required.  We now expect that local farms will produce roughly only about 5,000 or 6,000 chickens a day, the scale of this poultry slaughtering plant will be much smaller than what we have already planned. We think that the planning and implementation can be done a bit earlier.

Reporter: (about the buyout scheme)

Secretary for Food and Health: We set the target of 80% first as an aim that we can reduce a large amount of retailers and live chickens in the market.  With a percentage of 72%, we feel that a similar effect can be achieved. I don't think in such policy, you can achieve the exact percentage that you plan.  

Reporter: (about dairy products incidents)

Secretary for Food and Health: Most of the milk powder baby formula in Hong Kong are not produced on the Mainland.  There are only three brands that are produced on the Mainland, but they are all international brands.  On September 12, we already tested these three brands and proved that they were safe.  In the last week or so, we repeatedly tested those milk powder and proved that they were safe.  I think at the moment, for those that are sold in Hong Kong market, we can assume that they are reasonably safe.  We are still testing regularly.  Since the regulation on control of melamine was introduced and gazetted on Tuesday, this is also the responsibility of the trade to ensure that all their goods are safe and do not contain melamine exceeding the legal limit.

Reporter: (about dairy products incidents)

Secretary for Food and Health: If you look at the reports from the Mainland, those milk or milk products produced after September 14 would be reasonably safe.  Of course it is still important for each market to test its own products.  Whether those milk products that are produced before September 14 would be used for manufacturing other types of milk-related products, such as biscuits, cakes and chocolate, it depends on where they go.  That is the reason why we cannot simply ban Mainland products.  Products that travelled to other territories and countries might be used for manufacturing other products that are shipped to Hong Kong.

Reporter: (about services provided by designated clinics)

Secretary for Food and Health: It is still too early to say. In the last two days, we have examined more than 3,000 children in public hospitals.  So far, we have only discovered four cases.  Three of them actually came from the Mainland.  They are children born in Hong Kong but lived on the Mainland.  Their exposure might be different from Hong Kong children.  As I have said earlier, it is still too early to define the treatment protocol and screening protocol.  One of the tasks that we have to concentrate in the coming days is to ensure that we are giving the right screening procedures for children to get the most accurate diagnosis and to make sure that we do not do anything too excessive as well.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript)

Ends/Thursday, September 25, 2008
Issued at HKT 15:09

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