UNBS irked by reports of clearing expired sugar for sale

By Our Reporter

Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS) in a statement has described the New Vision story of Wednesday September 11, 2019 titled “UNBS cleared expired sugar for sale” as inaccurate and misleading.

The Standards agency says that the story “is damaging, blatantly deceptive and flies in the face of our mandate of protecting consumers against harmful and dangerous substandard products.”

“We would like to urge the public to disregard it and treat it with contempt it deserves.  We undeniably state that UNBS did not clear any expired sugar for sale,” Godwin Muhwezi, Head, Public Relations says in a statement.

He explains that the sugar in question was cleared in 2015 for re-processing as a raw material in line with internationally accepted standards.

He adds: “Laboratory analysis carried out before re-processing indicated that the sugar was free of heavy metals and that it did not contain any compounds that would pose a health risk to the consumer. Based on the results, re-processing was recommended with clear guidelines on how it would be carried out to safeguard the consumer.”

The official in a statement says  UNBS  explains that it  supervised the process to ensure that the sugar was subjected to adequate quality assurance measures as per the requirements of the Standard (US EAS 749:2010) and therefore was safe for human consumption.

“After the sugar was re-processed, it was further tested for conformity to standards and it passed. Therefore, it is grossly inaccurate to say UNBS cleared expired sugar,” says the statement.