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"Scandal begets scandal, who is responsible?" Expert: Products with pesticides more dangerous than salmonella
2025-04-07 11:03:33 / AKTUALITET
From December until now, scandal follows scandal when it comes to food safety. After the mandarins returned from Croatia, salmonella in chicken from Brazil and most recently the shipment of strawberries with pesticides from Greece, many questions are raised about food safety and who should be held responsible. In a connection with "Dita Jonë" safety expert Ana Vuksani blames the lack of transparency, lack of experts and corruption.
"There is a lack of control, a lack of transparency, a lack of experts and professionals, because in the AKU, the sector responsible for pesticide control throughout Albania is a food technologist. Even in the case of Tirana, there are no agronomists, we have a lack of transparency and corruption."
According to her, pesticides are much more dangerous than salmonella, which can be controlled by taking measures, while pesticides, Vuksani emphasizes, cause serious long-term damage to the body, from fetal deformation to cancerous diseases.
"Scandal begets scandal, once mandarins parasites in fish, salmonella. We can somehow condition the exposure to salmonella by taking certain measures, while pesticide residues in the body have no conditioning whatsoever. They are much more dangerous if we have food poisoning from salmonella, here we are all the same because there are no immediate clinical signs but it causes very serious damage in the long term from fetal deformation, genetic mutations, decreased reproduction and carcinogenic diseases. We have turned into a warehouse where everything that is not good for you enters our body."
Speaking about shipments of strawberries with pesticides from Greece, Vuksani stressed that the fact that there is no information from institutions is worrying.
"We have to deal with 4 loads, we have information as always after 2 months. Only for the first load that was on February 17, we are notified on April 4. More worrying is the fact that we have no information about the quantity of the 3 loads. I suspect that the other loads have a much larger quantity, which has become a trend that institutions do not provide any information, exposing consumers to food risks. As for pesticides, this is being done like a soap opera. We know about the tangerines in December that the ministry said were destroyed, but today we have no information about their destruction. The AKU and if until now if it did not know how to act, it had the case of tangerines to take measures to prevent this from happening to strawberries."
The expert emphasizes that it is impossible to distinguish one pesticide-laden product from another, but emphasized that it remains even during processing.
"The pesticides found in strawberries have been removed from the EU list because they are too dangerous. It has exceeded the permitted rate. We have a total of products that are not allowed to be traded in the EU. Pesticides have nothing to do with the season, they are like our antibiotics, when a plant is infected it is treated with pesticides."
Gjoksani points the finger at the institutions responsible for this scandal, which harms consumer health, and suggests the establishment of a Task Force.
"A general Task Force should be formed. It says they are contraband but the state has the mechanisms to fight it whether it is part of the contraband or they are left in agricultural warehouses. The last case showed that they are part of the import. Our state, according to the AKU, does not even know who makes those announcements because they do not stand up either as a structure or as a sentence. We have zero information about the quantity of these three that have been put on the market? The analyzes are coming out late and we find ourselves facing the fact that it has been consumed. Who is responsible for all these problems that are caused to my health as a consumer? The more transparent the institutions are, the more trustworthy they will be from the public, now we are realizing that there is a lot to hide."
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