This reminds me of the Ribena debacle, where a bunch of school kids stumbled onto the fact Ribena were lying massively about the amount of vitamin C in their product.
Also, why are we importing sand from China? We have sand at home.
McAllister said this led to NZ authorities alerting Australian regulators, who compelled the Brisbane lab - which had been bound by client confidentiality - to share the positive asbestos tests.
Wait, the lab found there was asbestos in a common children’s product, but they didn’t tell authorities because they had a contract to hide a major public health issue?
Also, why are we importing sand from China? We have sand at home.
The same reasons as always. Cheap labour and economy of scale.
Yeah, I have no idea how the lab keeping quiet about that was legal. Perhaps it wasn’t.
I started to ask, “what’s Ribena?” remembered it’s 2025 and found out on Wikipedia… But now that I’ve read it’s available as a “squash,” I have to ask, is that a British word for concentrate? (US juice concentrates are often frozen, but I’m guessing Ribena squash isn’t.)
Blackcurrant cordial we’d call it in Australia.
Yeah it is/was sold as a liquid concentrate.
Pick whatever weird word
your locale useserrfloats your boaterr dilutes your beverage ;-)I’m honestly not sure what a squash is, I thought of the sport at first.
Squash is a drink, fruit flavoured and you add water to it. Like fruit flavoured cordial if you have that over there?
Yes just like Ribena except this time it’s about giving cancer to kids.
My nephew goes to one of those now-closed schools. I want heads to roll.
If it helps, it’s likely that only some of the locations have actually been exposed, but there is a backlog in testing so that’s causing delays in getting results. The containers weren’t full of asbestos, but some of them were contaminated with it (hopefully only a small portion).
Also, single or short term exposure is unlikely to cause health issues. Asbestos exposure adds up over time so is the biggest risk for occupational exposure.
Now we get to the part of my comment that doesn’t help: it’s unlikely any of the stockists will face any real consequences for this.
But it’s something to remember when ordering things from overseas (particularly Aliexpress, Temu, Shein, etc) - you are the importer and so you are responsible for what you import. NZ safety standards have not been applied by the manufacturer.
That helps, cheers :)
