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By Roxanne Liu, David Stanway and Jake Spring
BEIJING / SHANGHAI / BRASILIA (Reuters) – Two cities in China discovered lines of the new coronavirus in shipments of imported frozen foods, the local government said Thursday that the World Health Organization has minimized the threat of the virus entering the food chain.
A pattern taken from the surface of frozen bird wings imported to the southern city of Shenzhen from Brazil, as well as external packaging patterns of frozen Ecuadorian shrimp sold in the northwestern city of Xian, tested positive for the virus, the Chinese local government said.
The Shenzhen government recognized that the bird comes from a factory owned by Aurora, Brazil’s third largest exporter of birds and pork.
As COVID-19 cases were shown to continue to accumulate worldwide, the findings raise new considerations that the coronavirus that causes the disease would possibly spread across surfaces and enter the food chain. A day earlier, officials began investigating whether the first instances of COVID-19 in New Zealand in more than 3 months had been imported by freight.
Viruses can last up to two years at temperatures of minus 20 degrees Celsius, however, scientists and officials say that so far there is no falsified evidence that coronavirus can spread through frozen food.
“People aren’t afraid of food, food packaging or food delivery,” Mike Ryan, director of the World Health Organization’s emergency program, said in a briefing.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration And the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a set that “there is no evidence that other people can get COVID-19 from food or food packaging.”
Brazil’s Aurora, who is not on the list, said he had not been officially notified through the Chinese government of the alleged contamination. The corporation stated that it was taking every imaginable measure to prevent the spread of coronavirus and that there was no evidence that it spread through food. Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture said it was seeking an explanation from the Chinese government.
Reuters was unable to succeed without delay at the Ecuadorian embassy in Beijing.
Shenzhen’s fitness government tracked and tested who would possibly have been in contact with potentially infected food products, and all effects were negative, according to the city’s opinion.
“It’s hard to say at what level the frozen bird was infected,” said a Chinese-based official of a Brazilian meat exporter.
The Shenzhen Bureau of Outbreak Control and Prevention said the public will need to take precautions to reduce the threat of infection with imported meat and shellfish.
The fitness commission in Shaanxi Province, where the city of Xian is located, said the government was testing other people and the surrounding area in a similar way to infected shrimp products, which were sold in a local market.
In addition to controlling all meat and seafood boxes entering primary ports in recent months, China has suspended some meat imports from the sites, adding Brazil, since mid-June.
Seven Argentine meat processing plants are temporarily exporting to China because they recorded cases of COVID-19 among their employees, a source of Argentine agricultural conditioning firm Senasa said Thursday.
Li Fengqin, who runs a microbiology lab at China’s National Food Safety Risk Assessment Center, told reporters in June that the option of infected frozen foods that cause new infections could be ruled out.
The Xinfadi market, a sprawling food market in Beijing’s Chinese capital, connected to an infection organization in June. The government stated that the virus was discovered at the market site on a cutting board handling imported salmon.
It remains to be determined how the virus entered the Xinfadi market position at the top, china’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in its latest research update in July. The market position will reopen from the weekend.
(Reporting through Roxanne Liu in Beijing, David Stanway in Shanghai and Jake Spring in Brasilia; Additional reporting through Shivani Singh in Beijing, Naveen Thukral in Singapore, Ana Mano in Sao Paulo, Tom Polansek in Chicago and Maximilian Heath in Buenos Aires; Written through Caroline Stauffer; edited through Tom Hogue and Rosalba O’Brien)