Now, in the saga that you can’t trust anything anymore that you eat and drink
in China, this story is very disturbing:
Traditional Chinese herbs are being contaminated with a toxic cocktail of pesticides that poses a threat to health and the environment, Greenpeace said. Its tests revealed that up to 48 of 65 samples purchased from nine pharmacies tested positive for pesticide residue, including banned substances. Some residue levels were hundreds of times higher than EU food safety standards, Greenpeace East Asia reported. The group found 51 different types of pesticide residue, and 26 of the samples contained pesticides that are banned in China. The samples included some from renowned producers such as Tongrentang, a Beijing-based pharmaceutical company founded in 1669 and the largest producer of traditional Chinese medicine. “Chinese herbs should heal, not harm people and must be pesticide free,” said Wang Jing of Greenpeace East Asia. “The current industrial agriculture system is heavily reliant on toxic chemicals at the expense of human and environmental health,” Wang said.
Dried sanqi flowers contained up to 39 kinds of pesticide, chrysanthemum up to 35 and honeysuckle flowers up to 21. Ten pesticides classified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as extremely or highly hazardous and six banned for use on Chinese herbs were found. Even leading traditional Chinese medicine makers don’t set standards or carry out tests for pesticide residue, Greenpeace claimed. Pesticide abuse in herb growing is only part of much bigger problem, which was the general failure of chemical-intensive agriculture to feed people safely while preventing environmental degradation, Greenpeace concluded, as reported in the Shanghai Daily.
(Source: FCCC Newsletter No 323, 1 July 2013)
Bad news for all of us. I do actually use TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine) on a regular base and recently I have been drinking chrysanthemum tea. What can we still trust here?