China investigates insecticide-tainted dumplings that sickened 10 in Japan

China said Thursday it has halted production and exports from a company whose insecticide-tainted frozen dumplings sickened 10 people in Japan in the latest crisis to rock China's scandal-hit food export business.

Officials from China's export safety watchdog agency said a "speedy investigation" was also being conducted involving products from Tianyang Food Processing.

"We are very concerned about the health of the Japanese consumers and we hope that they will make an early recovery," said Liu Deping, spokesman General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine.

Liu said the company has been stopped from producing, selling and exporting its goods. Its products have also been recalled.

The dumplings were contaminated with traces of an organic phosphorus insecticide called methamidophos, which caused severe abdominal pains, vomiting and diarrhea, Japanese officials said.

Traces of methamidophos were found in the dumplings, their containers and in the patients' vomit, Japan's Health Ministry said.

Telephone calls to Tianyang, headquartered in the northern city of Jinzhou, and to its parent company, Hebei Foodstuffs Import & Export Group, were unanswered.

China's reputation as a safe exporter has taken a beating in the past year following the discoveries of dangerous chemicals tainting products from toothpaste to toys and a pet food ingredient. Amid repeated product recalls, China announced a series of measures to boost supervision. Officials declared a four-month quality and safety campaign, which ended in December, a success.

With the Beijing Olympic Games less than 200 days away, authorities have promised rigorous measures to ensure safe food supplies, even unveiling an Olympic Food Safety Command Center to deal with food emergencies.

"I'm afraid there was a rather loose safety awareness on the Chinese side," Japanese government spokesman Nobutaka Machimura said Thursday at a regularly scheduled news conference. "Now the problems have occurred; we urge China to closely investigate what exactly is going on."

Officials from the food safety agency said the problems involved dumplings made on Oct. 1 and Oct. 20. Wang Daning, head of the safety watchdog's import and export food safety department, said, however, "We've examined these two batches and have not found any problems."

He said Japanese health officials found problems only in the dumplings where people got sick — not in others from the same batches.

Japanese health officials said they had suspended imports of all products from Tianyang and were conducting a nationwide survey of any additional dumpling-related health problems.

Japan's Health Ministry also ordered the dumplings' importer and distributor, JT Foods Co. Ltd. — an affiliate of the country's largest tobacco company — to recall the tainted dumplings. JT Foods had distributed 13 tons of dumplings each in the prefectures (states) of Chiba and Hyogo, the ministry said.

Three people in Hyogo and seven in Chiba, near Tokyo, were sickened, seriously. A 5-year-old girl fell into a coma but later regained consciousness, the ministry said.

Japan in recent months has been hit with its own domestic food safety scandals involving recycled red bean filling, mislabeled meat and the use of outdated milk, cream and eggs in a popular brand of cream puffs.

In 2000, Snow Brand Milk Products Co. shipped out old milk and sickened more than 14,000 people in Japan's worst-ever outbreak of food poisoning.