In recent years, Chinese people have fought hard but ineffectively against poor food safety standards. There are simply too many tainted foods, from raw food products to cooking oil and food utensils. Waste oil, toxic chopsticks, and toxic lunch boxes can still be cleaned up, but there are three sources of poisoning which are most difficult to handle.
Zhao Lianhai is a 37 year old former government employee from Beijing, who was recently arrested and charged with provoking social disorder.
His son was one of 300,000 kids poisoned by contaminated milk across China.
Mr Zhao used to work for the country's food quality and safety authority, so he started a website advising parents of affected children and campaigned to take responsible companies to court.
Shanghai Panda, one of the nation's smaller dairies, was among 22 companies originally implicated in the 2008 scandal and was briefly shut by quality inspectors.
Now, among the allegations against the company are that instead of destroying its melamine-tainted product that had been recalled in 2008, Shanghai Panda reconstituted the milk into new products.
The Ministry of Health issued a statement saying that 860 babies who drank tainted milk were still hospitalized with kidney or urinary-tract problems; 154 of those were described as being in serious condition. “Most of the sickened children received outpatient treatment only for small amounts of sand-like kidney stones found in their urinary systems, while a part of the patients had to be hospitalized for the illness,” the ministry said.
Under the directive, FDA inspectors at U.S. ports of entry will detain foods from China made with milk and certain ingredients derived from milk. Importers must pay to have their products tested by an independent laboratory that meets FDA standards. Only products found to be melamine-free will be allowed into the country.
The order also applies to pet foods and some bulk protein products, the focus of a melamine recall in 2007.
Essentially, the FDA action shifts the burden of proof to Chinese companies, which must now supply evidence that their products are safe. Most consumers should not be affected, since major U.S. food manufacturers get their milk ingredients here.
In food products other than infant formula, the FDA concludes that levels of melamine and melamine-related compounds below 2.5 parts per million (ppm) do not raise concerns.
Concerned keepers sent the animals for a check up after hearing about the milk contamination and have now stopped feeding with Sanlu milk.
The orang-utans and the lion are the only animals to have developed kidney stones and are being treated for the condition.
Officials at the Beijing Zoo and zoos in the other major cities of Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xian said they had no cases of animals sickened from milk powder, the Associated Press reported.
The World Health Organisation has asked the Chinese authorities to explain why it took months for the tainted milk scandal to be made public.
The UN children's agency UNICEF has asked Chinese authorities to launch a full investigation into the matter.
Leon said the FDA is sampling bulk shipments of milk-derived products from Asia for possible contamination with melamine or other banned ingredients. The products being tested include whole milk powder, whey powder, milk concentrate, lactose, casein protein, and other milk derivatives.
The State Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said it had tested 491 batches of baby milk powder produced by all the 109 companies in the country in a special inspection move.
69 batches from 22 companies nationwide were found containing melamine, a chemical which had tainted Sanlu's baby formula and led to kidney stone illness of more than 1,200 infants across the country.
The number of companies with melamine-tainted milk accounted for 20.18 percent of the total of milk powder companies in China. And the number of tainted batches accounted for 14.05 percent of the total batches tested.
The melamine content in the Sanlu brand reached 2,563 mg per kg, the highest among all the samples. In other samples, the range was from 0.09 mg to 619 mg per kilogram.
In response to reports of contaminated milk-based infant formula manufactured in China, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today is issuing a Health Information Advisory. This is to assure the American public that there is no known threat of contamination in infant formula manufactured by companies that have met the requirements to sell infant formula in the United States. Although no Chinese manufacturers of infant formula have fulfilled the requirements to sell infant formula in the United States, FDA officials are investigating whether or not infant formula manufactured in China is being sold in specialty markets which serve the Asian community.
The FDA is advising caregivers not to feed infant formula manufactured in China to infants. This should be replaced with an appropriate infant formula manufactured in the United States as mentioned below.
Hundreds of Carrefour and Wal-Mart stores in China are pulling Sanlu milk powder off shelves.
The withdrawal came after both the health authority and Sanlu confirmed the milk to be contaminated with a toxic chemical.
Dong Yuguo, spokesman for Wal-Mart China, said on Friday the company received notices to stop selling the formula.
Xinhua's reporter did not find Sanlu milk powder on shelves in one of the Wal-Mart stores in the Xuanwu District, Beijing, Friday afternoon. The store staff said the brand was ordered to be withdrawn.
Wal-Mart now has 109 stores in China.
At least 2.5 million broiler chickens from an Indiana producer were fed pet food scraps contaminated with the chemical melamine and subsequently sold for human consumption, federal health officials reported yesterday.
Hundreds of other producers may have similarly sold an unknown amount of contaminated poultry in recent months, they added, painting a picture of much broader consumption of contaminated feed and food than had previously been acknowledged in the widening pet food scandal.
[...]
Meanwhile, the FDA expanded the number of plant-based protein products from China on its "do not import" list, pending the completion of further tests on various kinds of glutens, protein concentrates and other products.
At the center of the problem are pet foods spiked with melamine, a mildly toxic chemical that can make food appear to have more protein than it does. Most of the food went to pets, but scraps were sold in February to the Indiana poultry producer, officials said. The contaminated material may have made up about 5 percent of the chickens' total food supply.
That small fraction, and the fact that people, unlike pets, do not eat the same thing day after day, suggests that consumers who ate contaminated pork or chicken would probably have ingested extremely small doses of melamine, well below the threshold for causing health effects, officials said. Experts conceded, however, that they know little about how the toxin interacts with other compounds in food.
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
“Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed,” said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. “I don’t know if there’s a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says ‘don’t do it,’ so everyone’s doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren’t they? If there’s no accident, there won’t be any regulation.”
Melamine is at the center of a recall of 60 million packages of pet food, after the chemical was found in wheat gluten linked this month to the deaths of at least 16 pets in the United States.
