kitchen hazards
hi. i'm scott gallacher, the acting director-general of the ministry for primary industries in new zealand. the new zealand government takes foodsafety extremely seriously. as a country we've built a reputation around the world for the safety of our foods. that's because the government puts a lot of effort into ensuring the safety of the people who eat new zealand product. we have strict laws and checks right through the process
of producing food, from the farmthrough to the plate. if things go wrong we act immediately to protect consumers. our system is one of total transparency so that everyone who could be affectedby a food safety issue is told early. a good example of our system at work is the recent issue with suspected botulism in milk products.
as soon as we found out about the possibility that some newzealand milk products were potentially contaminated with botulism we worked hard to trace where it wentand immediately told all countries that could have been affected. we made sure consumers were told about the potential dangers and the companies involved conducted precautionary recalls of their products. when we got the results of testing
it showed that the products were notcontaminated after all. they were safe. we stand by our precautionary approach because at the time we could not be sure that the products were not contaminated,and making sure consumers are safe is new zealand's number one priority. the government is now running a formal inquiry to find out if there are any changes we can make to our systems
to make them even better. in the meantime we are making interim changeswhich will mean more government oversight overprocessing, more testing, and tighter systems.
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