Japan detects pesticide in China beans

Japan ordered on Wednesday retailers to pull frozen beans from China off the shelves after a woman fell ill eating a product which had 34,500 times the legal limit of pesticide, officials said.

Japan's health ministry instructed retailers and importers nationwide to suspend sales of frozen green beans from a Chinese supplier.

A ministry official said the woman felt numb in her mouth on Sunday after eating a dish using the beans, which she had bought at a Tokyo supermarket.

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"It is too early to determine" whether the beans were contaminated in China, said Kawamura, the government's spokesman.

The importer, Tokyo-based Nichirei Foods, said it sourced the beans from a company called Yantai Beihai Foodstuff in eastern Shandong province.

"We conducted an inspection on a sample of the beans before importing them but did not detect pesticides," a Nichirei Foods spokesman said.

The beans were grown in Heilongjiang province in northeastern China where there was no record of any use of pesticides, the importer said.

The woman bought the frozen beans at a branch of the Ito-Yokado supermarket chain in Tokyo's middle-class Hachioji neighbourhood.

"We checked bags of the same product but didn't find any holes or any abnormalities," the manager of the supermarket told reporters in televised footage.

Food safety has turned into a major political issue in Japan , which imports 60 per cent of its food - the highest rate of any rich country.

Ten people suffered pesticide poisoning in December and January, and thousands of others reported feeling sick after eating frozen dumplings imported from China. One girl went into a coma before recovering.

Japan and China, who have been working to repair sometimes rocky relations, have held meetings in a bid to find the cause of the pesticide contamination.

China's image as a food producer has suffered in recent months because of a scandal over milk products tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Four Chinese children are known to have died and at least 53,000 made ill after consuming the melamine-laced milk, leading to import bans being imposed by countries around the world.