The Melamine in China's Milk

Filed in archive News on September 28, 2008

Well, I've tried to ignore this story, but I suppose the time has come to comment on it...

WaPo had a story in their Sunday paper. In China you can take your child to the hospital and have its kidneys tested for free. According to the Post article:

Despite official assurances that the problem is under control, the crisis appears to be spreading - to cake in Hong Kong, a popular brand of candy in Asia and Britain, ham and sausage products in Japan and even a zoo near Shanghai where baby animals were fed formula. More than a dozen countries have banned or recalled Chinese dairy products, and the European Union announced that it was banning all baby food from China containing even trace amounts of milk.

On Friday, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration recommended that consumers avoid Mr. Brown instant coffee and White Rabbit candy, both made in China.

I've lost track of the number of deaths - four or five, maybe. The Post story cited 54,000 babies sick and almost 13,000 in the hospital.


© myuibe





A story yesterday in the Chicago Tribune pointed out in passing a story behind the story. Beijing doesn't want the information to spread; but when the public is this upset, even the Government of China can't control the flow of information completely...

Call it a quality control issue if you like, but melamine is really a an issue of fraud. Melamine is normally found in plastics. In milk products it the protein content (or at least the appearance of protein - I'm not sure). And that gets done so that the mild can be watered down. It's been a problem for a while now; melamine contamination was one of my first stories when I came to this blog almost 16 months ago.

The astonishing fact is that despite past problems with melamine in China, problems that created public relations nightmares for the companies involved, China's largest infant formula producer, the Sanlu company, is involved in the current scandal.

Some sources speculate that the current crisis was kept under wraps until after the Olympics was over so that China wouldn't be embarrassed on that international stage.

The Chinese are pointing their fingers at the US at the moment and talking about the economic collapse on Wall Street and about how much better their more conservative credit and banking system works. If they can't put a stop to this sort of product contamination, that won't matter much in the long run...