sugarcane juice is a bane

Someone forwarded this article to me to my hotmail account. Usually i will just pass it off as spam mail, chain letter etc. However, the content of this email is so closely related to me that i do think that i should pay EXTRA attention to it.

If you enjoy eating at hawker centres, order a variety of food to share with friends/family and add on a cup of sugar cane juice....

then read on.
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Health News - About Sugar Cane Drinks

This email was sent by a colleague whose father is working with the Ministry of the Environment in Singapore.

Health News - About Sugar Cane Drinks

A friend whose father works for the government health inspection passed on his info. Their job is to inspect all hawkers, their cooked food, their store hygiene, etc. They found sugar cane juice has the highest content of bacteria among all food. In fact, it has exceeded the set limit. Hence, these guys had to find out why. They went round all sugar cane stores and watched the way the hawkers handled their sugar cane, wash their glasses, their entire procedure. But they couldn't find the problem.

One day, they stayed till closing time and discovered some shocking facts! Whenever, the hawkers closed their stores, they would wash the floor with detergent. As we know, the remaining sugar canes will be placed at the back of the store, vertically standing and as sugar canes are very porous, they tend to absorb whatever liquid around them. Besides the soapy water, the dirt on hawkers' boots, cats' urine,etc, will all be absorbed??

Now, whenever I eat at a hawker centre, I would warn all my friends about this and of course I stopped drinking my favourite sugar cane juice. A friend, who loved sugar cane juice, was pregnant. She was always drinking sugar cane juice. Anyway, one day she miscarried and the fetus was already like 6 or 7 months old, I think. When the doctors did an autopsy to find out why all of a sudden the fetus had died inside her, they found traces of some chemical substance, which was found in cat urine. Large traces of it. While it would not be able to harm adults, it was extremely toxic to babies,what more a fetus? So they tried to determine how this cat urine thing could have ended up in the fetus. This meant that it had to be digested by the mother, right? And the only logical conclusion they could come up with was that since these sugar cane juice stall holders just leave the canes lying around on the wet and dirty floor, it would not be impossible to think that stray cats could have peed on those sugar canes or near those sugar canes. So think carefully the next time you order that favourite sugar cane juice!

Please pass this on to everyone you know in S'pore & M'sia. Let's take action to make this world a better & safer place for ALL of us & the generations to come.
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Well, i believe that there is truth in this email as i can attest to the fact that hawkers always put their sugar canes vertically standing.

YUCKS. to think that i have drank almost a thousand cups of sugar cane juice over my lifetime. and what if i've ingested cat urine as well? i hate cats. its not the bacteria that irks me. but the fact that cat's urine might be present!

anyway, this is just a reminder for you to check the hygiene standards of any hawker stall before buying from them. Especially when you want to buy sugar cane juice... You WON'T want to be drinking cat's urine/detergent/germs/viruses together with your food right?

oh shit. i'm thinking too much. im beginning to think that the gastric pain that i'm experiencing now is due to the sugar cane juice which i just had over dinner with marcus and clive and new found friend- jin quan.

haha..