Uganda- DDA fights mobile milk vendors

23 Nov. 2010
New Vision [edited] [BITES]
The Dairy Development Authority (DDA) and the Police impounded over 250 containers and cans containing milk in an operation aimed at maintaining the quality and safety of the raw milk sold by mobile vendors. A dairy inspector said the containers were impounded from milk traders transporting milk to collecting centers in Kiruhura and Lyantonde districts. The operation followed complaints that milk traders in the two districts were adulterating milk with water. The traders are also accused of using non-food grade plastic containers to handle milk. The DDA ensures quality and safety of milk and its products in Uganda.


Gambia- Campaign for food safety gains momentum as bio-security, draft food safety policy validated

27 Oct. 2010
Daily Observer [edited] [BITES]
The National Codex Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary Committee, in collaboration with the Food Safety Quality Hygiene Enforcement Directorate began a two-day stockholders forum at the conference hall of the National Nutrition Agency (NaNA). The forum, which is funded by the World Health Organisation (WHO), aims at validating the draft food safety policy and the national bio-security framework. This forum is important in Gambia’s quest for quality food production and consumption, since food is central to the prosperity, health and social well-being of individuals, and strengthening food safety in the country will help to decrease the burden of food born diseases, reduce poverty and achieve many of the Millennium Development Goals.


Uganda- Preparing for transgenic bananas

4 October 2010
CAHFS DailyNews [edited]
Scientists in Uganda will soon start field trials of a banana variety genetically engineered to resist a bacterial disease that has been decimating crops across central Africa. The new variety is part of a wider effort to improve the East African Highland banana. Due to delays to a law regulating the commercial growing of genetically modified food in the country, it is not clear when the banana could be released to farmers. The bananas have a gene from the green pepper to protect against banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW), which costs farmers in Africa's Great Lakes region an estimated half a billion dollars every year.


Africa- Cholera and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration

21 September 2010
Wall Street Journal [edited] [BITES]
Since May, cholera has killed nearly 800 people in Nigeria and Cameroon alone, and the World Health Organization has recorded nearly 4,000 cases in the Lake Chad Basin. Inadequate access to clean water means that waterborne diseases like cholera spread rapidly, causing extreme diarrhea and deadly dehydration if left untreated. The United Nations estimates that diarrheal diseases kill 1.8 million people every year. An American company has hit on an improvement to existing rehydration therapies, which could mean another tool in the fight against diarrhea deaths. The product consists of a genetically modified rice strain from which it cheaply extracts two proteins also found in human breast milk. After a panel of food, medicine, immunology, child nutrition, and health experts had declared its product safe in 2004, the company submitted it as a food supplement to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, but heard nothing back. It became clear this year that final approval was not forthcoming so the company withdrew its submission.