Rentokil Pest Control Malaysia Extends Partnership with the Ministry of Health To Improve Food Safety in East Malaysia

In 2015 alone, there were 266,319 hospitalisations recorded in Malaysia where 15,346 were due to food related illnesses such as food poisoning, typhoid, cholera, dysentery, etc. Hence, the process of ensuring safer foods in the supply chain has become more and more challenging as human population increases.

Additionally, toxicity fears spread in Europe recently when supermarkets had to withdraw millions of eggs that were contaminated with insecticide. Food produced with eggs also had to be withdrawn from sale and farms were suspended or closed. Nearer to home, a prominent milk brand in Malaysia nearly sabotaged their strong brand presence when its milk products were recalled across the country due to bacterial contamination. As a result, this incident had negatively impacted the brand’s reputation and it was a challenging task to regain consumer confidence as the news and public sentiment were widely spread on social media.

As part of MOH's continuous effort in increasing food safety standards in Malaysia, training and workshops are conducted to further strengthen the food safety inspectors capabilities. And as MOH's partner, Technical experts from Rentokil Initial Malaysia have also joined as trainers in sharing their expertise on Integrated Pest Management (IPM) on the 3-day Food Safety Training.

Rentokil Initial Malaysia live by their mission - Protecting People from the dangers of pest-borne diseases, Enhancing Lives with services that protect the health and wellbeing of people, and the reputation of their customers. Hence, one of Rentokil Initial Malaysia top priorities is to ensure the safe food consumption.

“At Rentokil Initial Malaysia, this is something that our team has been working on over the years. With the right approach, this will ultimately help us ensure that key industry players take a much more proactive approach in managing food safety risks across the supply chains. Predicting likely sources of contamination and food-borne disease outbreaks, detecting food safety threats as they happen and implementing control measures before threats can spread. This will improve efficiencies and reduce losses throughout the supply chain. Most importantly, raising standards in food safety and create safer food for all,” said Carol Lam, the Managing Director of Rentokil Initial Malaysia.