List sets out key tasks to improve food safety

The State Council's Food Safety Commission has laid out a series of key tasks to improve food quality and safety this year for local governments and other authorities.

The tasks include conducting risk assessment, formulating standards, reducing the use of pesticides and veterinary drugs, improving the quality of domestic-made infant formulas and guaranteeing food safety in schools, according to a list released on Friday.

Local governments and other authorities should also work to improve the quality and safety of agricultural produce, strengthen random checks for residual pesticides, veterinary drugs and heavy metals, and enhance inspections of food producers.

25,800 hotels ordered to take action on hygiene

The National Health Commission carried out a campaign to inspect the hygiene of hotels early this year that covered more than 157,000 hotels, according to a report released on Thursday.

By the end of March, local health authorities had demanded more than 25,800 hotels address problems found during the inspection campaign and improve their hygiene conditions, and had carried out follow-up investigations of more than 3,400 hotels.

The commission asked local health authorities to carefully analyze the results of the inspection and strengthen coordination with other government departments to consolidate achievements.

They should also follow up and make sure hotels found to have broken the law rectify the situation. Hotels that do not improve their hygiene conditions promptly should be punished heavily according to law.

The commission also published two lists of hotels that were found to have committed several breaches of law during the campaign, and those that had violated the law more than once in the 12 months to March.