A RECENT news report in The New Nation said a syndicate is supplying dead chickens to city hotels, restaurants and fast food shops for long causing serious threats to public health and the practice is going on almost unabated as the health inspectors are not monitoring the situation for unspecific reasons. This is a crime that needs serious attention of the authorities concerned. By serving food with dead chicken meat which is also prepared in unhygienic condition, restaurant owners are making hefty profits. But the eaters at the restaurants who are mainly low to middle income businessmen and government and private employees remain regularly vulnerable to serious diseases like gastronomical disorders, kidney and brain diseases.
The reports said that a mobile court during a drive at a house near the Tejgaon wholesale chicken market in the capital on Thursday recovered 120 dead chickens. The court sentenced two persons — a man and a woman — to two years imprisonment for selling dead chickens and also fined them taka one lakh each. During interrogations the convicts confessed that they supplied around 2000 to 3000 dead chickens to hotels and restaurants in the city everyday. These chickens usually die on trucks while being carried to the city from different parts of the country and they have worked out an arrangement with traders and hotel-restaurants in this regard. Karwan Bazar, Kaptan Bazar, Jatrabari, New Market and Fakirapool are some chicken markets in the city which are regularly injecting dead chickens to the supply chain.
The allegations also said selected agents work with suppliers in the city to collect dead chickens from dustbins at night.
The dead chickens are then supplied to hotels and fast food shops before the dawn breaks. Later, the chicken meat is served to customers although the eaters have no knowledge about that. Truly speaking, there is no system of frequent inspection of the quality of food by health officials. There is hardly any cheap restaurant in the city where healthy foods are served. Another allegation is that most restaurants are serving buffalo meat by passing it off as beef. The restaurant business in the city now means serving adulterated and sub-standard food including meat from dead cows and chickens. Most Chinese restaurants also serve dead chicken meat along with restaurants and fast food shops despite frequent warnings of its danger from physicians.
We know that the supply of dead chickens to city hotels and restaurants is not something new. Mobile courts have also unearthed such traders and punished them on many previous occasions in the past but the question is why the authorities concerned can’t run a sustained drive to root out it. The situation shows the utter neglect of the health authorities to regularly monitor the situation. We suggest that the responsibility to find aberrant behaviour in the food supply chain must lie with the health inspectors and exemplary punishments must be meted out to those who may fail to keep track of it. Mobile court surveillance must also be enhanced to stop the deadly trade. The nation can’t surrender its health safety to unscrupulous traders.
