US officials to arrive for talks on food, drug safety with China

A team of U.S. health officials arrived in Beijing on Tuesday for talks on food and drug safety after a string of toxic Chinese exports triggered global concern about the country's products.

The delegation, led by U.S. Health and Human Services official Rich McKeown, will discuss boosting the flow of information and devising regulations that both sides can be confident in, the department said in a statement issued prior to the group's arrival.

They will focus on developing a pair of agreements on the safety of food and feed and safety of drugs and medical devices, hopefully to be completed by December, said the statement, attributed to department Secretary Mike Leavitt.

"Our U.S. regulatory agencies are concerned about what they see as an insufficient infrastructure across the board in China to assure the safety, quality and effectiveness of many products exported to the United States," Leavitt was quoted as saying in the statement.

"We believe that with the technology, the scientific expertise, and the commitment each side has, we can work together to correct the outstanding issues," Leavitt said.

McKeown is Leavitt's chief-of-staff.

An official with China's General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine, the chief body for monitoring product safety, said Tuesday that a vice minister will meet with the HHS team but did not give details.

Chinese officials have said that talks would also center on a U.S. block on catfish, basa, dace, shrimp and eel imposed after repeated testing turned up contamination with drugs that have not been approved in the United States for farmed seafood.

International worries about Chinese exports were triggered earlier this year when a pet food ingredient from China was linked to the deaths of cats and dogs in North America.

Since then, a growing list of exports _ including toothpaste, tires and seafood _ have been recalled or rejected around the world.

The latest warning came over the weekend from California, which told consumers in the northern part of the state not to eat ginger imported from China because it might contain a dangerous pesticide _ aldicarb sulfoxide _ which is not approved for use on ginger in California.

The California Department of Public Health said it had received no reports of illness from customers who ate the contaminated ginger.

The trip by U.S. health officials comes a week after the European Union's top consumer official paid a five-day visit to China and urged the leadership to stick to its commitment to be more transparent about actions it takes against manufacturers who make goods recalled in Europe.

In May, U.S. officials met with China for the second round of Strategic Economic Dialogue talks, where they also discussed food safety. Leavitt said the countries have committed to a series of bilateral discussions on the subject.

Leavitt said the information his office gathers this week will contribute to the recommendations the Working Group on Import Safety, which he chairs, will make to President George W. Bush in September.

Chinese leaders and officials, initially unwilling to address the problem, have in recent days been aggressively publicizing efforts to improve surveillance and crack down on the country's countless small, unregulated factories, which are at the heart of China's ongoing product safety woes.

Hong Kong and foreign news reports have said that state-run media have been told by Communist Party propaganda departments not to publish negative articles on the issue. This is a common move in China, which regularly suppresses news that makes the ruling regime look bad.

An official with the Beijing Municipal Propaganda Department said no such ban had been imposed.