Beijing wants to clean up restaurants ahead of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games and is asking restaurant worker to wash their hands because of several food-related health scares. City health director Jin Dapeng told reporters, “we are taking robust measures in order to safeguard food and drug safety. This year is a very important year for the preparation work (for 2008)”, he said.
City and Olympic officials plan to focus on the control and prevention of infectious diseases, food and drinking water safety, and on boosting the emergency response capacity of key hospitals.
Zhang Zhikuan, head of Beijing’s commercial bureau, said the city has employed 6,480 food inspectors to try to guarantee the safety of all food products.
Officials will categorize the city’s 30,000 restaurants and close those which fail to meet basic sanitation standards. Restaurant workers will have to get city-issued certificates to show they are healthy, and restaurants that fail to meet standards will have to shape up or face getting shut down, said Jin.
The Beijing government has devised a colour-coded system of alerts for dealing with food emergencies, reports the official China Daily newspaper.
Jin said another reason to improve the cleanliness of restaurants was to create a good impression among visitors. “We want foreigners coming here in 2008 to feel assured when eating Chinese food”.
Meanwhile Beijing 2008 organizers vow to punish those spoofing Olympic symbols online.
Internet users have reportedly transformed the emblem for the 2008 Games into signs for male and female public restrooms, and in one case the heads of the Beijing Olympic mascots, the five Fuwas, were replaced with famous Chinese comedians.
The 2008 Organizing Committee called it “tarnishing the Olympic spirit” and said, “we will take legal measures should things get any worse”, reports the Beijing Youth Daily.
But the Beijing-based Mirror quoted Fang Yu, a lawyer from the Beijing Dadi Law Firm, saying that the Regulations on the Protection of Olympic Symbols effective from 2002 only prohibit the unauthorized use or redesign of any Olympic symbol for commercial gain, so the regulation may not apply in this case.
