Afraid to monitor and fall asleep on guard: The Ministry of Health has abandoned us in the salmonella case in chocolate

More than two weeks passed from Strauss' initial inspection until senior officials from the Ministry of Health arrived at the candy factory infected with the Galilee landscape.

The public must ask: What is the regulator worth if he is not there on a daily basis to make sure everything is in order, and if it takes him so long to wake up?

Meirav Cohen

01/05/2022

Sunday, 01 May 2022, 11:16 Updated: 11:53

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In the video: Senior Ministry of Health visit the Strauss plant after the discovery of salmonella in the plant (Photo: Yoav Itiel)

About a week ago, the salmonella affair exploded in Strauss, and since then the Ministry of Health has been busy defending and minimizing damage, and probably rightly so.

The Food Health Division of the Ministry of Health bears a heavy responsibility, but in fact it is a weakened division and has no working protocol with the companies, who prefer to continue to weaken it.

Also this week we saw how the Ministry of Health has abandoned our health in favor of industrial quiet with the companies it needs to oversee, but of which it is mostly afraid.

Health Minister Nitzan Horowitz's first response to the case said that "this is a good example of why regulation is needed and why the state needs to monitor, especially in the face of powerful corporations. Because if we do not save - there will be a jungle."

Well, Minister - we live in the jungle under your responsibility.

The regulator was not there to monitor at best, and at worst even silenced criticism and tried to sweep under the rug the glitches.

The food department of the firm has quite lax work protocols, most of the responsibility is on the companies, and there is no work procedure that specifies when the products should be tested and who is responsible for speeding up the results if there are alarming findings that could endanger the public.

So Horowitz was quick to praise the regulator, so that we would not notice how much there is really no oversight.

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Ash and Arali Price at the Strauss-Elite factory in Nazareth, last week (Photo: Yoav Itiel)

Let's get down to the details.

Strauss informed the Ministry of Health that they found preliminary findings in their products as early as Tuesday, in the middle of the week.

Since it takes between four and five days to receive the test results, the company apparently performed the tests on the products on the eve of Passover, at the latest.

But no one in the Ministry of Health required the company to get results as quickly as possible because it was a holiday, and government ministries work on a limited basis.

Even after the public had already learned that there was a problem, five more days passed until results were obtained on the finished products.

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To the full article

So if we put it all together - from the moment the company tested itself, just out of kindness and not by virtue of the regulator's decision or demand, to the moment it became known for sure that there was salmonella in the products marketed - more than two weeks passed.

Then, and only then, senior officials of the Ministry of Health, including the director general of the ministry, Nachman Ash, came to inspect the factory.

The worst information of all

What is the value of the regulator if it is not there on the daily continuum to monitor and check that everything is fine and for our citizens?

More than that: what is the work of the regulator worth if even in a crisis it takes him two weeks to wake up and realize that there is a problem?

True, the Ministry of Health has gone through two very difficult years because of the corona crisis, and other diseases that come back to us like polio.

But if office work is harmed by this, we as a public must know about it immediately.

And the hardest information of all, and the worst of all, is that there was an audit by the Ministry of Health on March 30 at the finished products factory - two weeks before the company decided to test itself.

The Ministry of Health refuses to disclose the report from the same review, but we are all required to ask: Are these reviews helpful and effective, or do ministry staff come there to eat borax, or in this case chocolate, just to mark V and go.

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• Strauss

• Ministry of Health

• Nitzan Horowitz

• Nachman Ash