BEIJING: Two chefs in China have been handed suspended prison sentences for adding antibiotics to food in a misguided attempt to prevent customers from developing diarrhoea after eating in their restaurant.
Last month, a court in Nantong, eastern China’s Jiangsu province, sentenced a chef, surnamed Sha, and his colleague identified as Fu, to two years and 18 months in jail respectively, on the charge of producing and selling toxic and harmful food.
Their sentences were suspended for an unidentified period, according to the Modern Express.
The pair were also fined a combined 160,000 yuan (US$22,000) and ordered to apologise publicly via the media.
They were caught in September last year after a restaurant employee told the authorities that some chefs had injected gentamicin sulphate into dishes before serving them to customers.
Law enforcement officials promptly arrived at the restaurant, the name of which was not released in the report, for an inspection.
Officials found four empty boxes of the medicine in a kitchen dustbin and 101 unused boxes in the office of Sha, who was the head chef.
Officials seized dozens of boxes of the drugs when they raided the restaurant. - Weibo
Examination of some dishes at the site showed the food contained traces of the medicine.
Gentamicin sulphate (pic above), a type of antibiotic, was widely used to treat diarrhoea in China decades ago because it was cheap. Today, it is available on prescription from pharmacies or doctors’ surgeries.
Experts say it should not be taken by elderly people or children because of its possible side effects, which include the potential to damage hearing and kidneys.
The two defendants said they injected the dishes with the antibiotics so that customers would not suffer from diarrhoea after eating their “rather unhygienic” food.
They said they added a small amount by pouring a 2ml bottle of the medicine into cold appetisers per table.
Since the beginning of last year, more than 1,600 dishes, worth about 80,000 yuan (US$11,000), have been tainted with the drug, the chefs confessed.
The restaurant where the duo worked was fined 1.18 million yuan (US$165,000) and has had its business licence revoked.
The market supervising authority banned Sha and Fu from working in the food industry for life, while the two managers of the eatery were each banned for five years.
Food scandals frequently make headlines in mainland China.
Last year, a college in eastern Jiangxi province shocked the nation after investigators concluded a foreign object found in a duck’s neck dish served in the students’ canteen was a mouse’s head. - South China Morning Post
