Asian food exporters were warned by UN experts today that they needed to clean up their act to meet the increasingly tough food safety standards of their main trading partners.

"Food-borne diseases remain a serious public health problem in the region and their death toll is unacceptable," World Health Organisationscientist Peter Ben Embarek told reporters after a four-day conference in Seremban.

There were more than 20 million cases of food-borne parasitic infections in the region annually, accounting for 50 percent of the global total, he said.

The conference heard earlier that more than 700,000 people die from consuming contaminated food or water in the Asia-Pacific region every year.

As a major exporter of food products, Asia "has to adhere to the increasingly stringent food safety standards of its trading partners, in addition to ensuring safe food for its own consumers," said Ezzedine Boutrif of the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).

The conference also called for greater transparency by governments over food-borne diseases, and Embarek congratulated China for making a "tremendous improvement" recently.

Urgent action

Although the outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) and bird flu which caused major public health crises in Asia were not food-borne diseases, the conference heard they were related to the way animals intended for consumption are handled.

"We are receiving more and more reports of food-borne outbreaks in China, which is a good sign that they are more willing to share this knowledge both nationally and internationally. This was probably triggered by the recent public health crisis," Embarek said.

The conference, attended by some 230 food safety policy-makers and specialists from 40 countries in the region, called for urgent action to strengthen the exchange of information between countries and update food safety policies and legislation.

Regional governments were urged to ensure that good practices minimising the risk of contamination were applied by producers, processors and consumers. - AFP