Posted on 10/08/2008 10:22:01 PM PDT by neverdem
BEIJING — China said Wednesday that it had established limits for the allowable trace amounts of melamine in dairy products that officials assured would make the items safe. The toxic industrial chemical is at the heart of one of this country’s worst food contamination crises.
The imposition of the limits, announced by the Health Ministry at a news conference, was the latest in a series of steps undertaken by the government to rebuild consumer confidence after revelations last month that at least three babies had died and 53,000 children had been sickened by drinking milk products adulterated with melamine, which was used illegally to artificially inflate protein levels. Consumption can cause kidney stones and other complications.
But ministry officials refused to provide updated statistics on the total number of victims. Late Wednesday they said 10,700 children were still hospitalized and 36,100 had been discharged. They added that on Wednesday alone, 539 children were admitted to hospitals.
The crisis has expanded into an international problem for China because melamine has been showing up in a wide range of products that include Chinese dairy ingredients. A growing number of countries have banned or limited suspect food imports from China as a result.
Health Ministry officials said at the news conference that traces of melamine are found in many food products because melamine is used to make plastic, and can seep into food from packaging. A certain amount of melamine can be tolerated, they said.
Previously there had been no standards for safe levels of melamine in food, the officials said...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ping
I bet the commies were not prepared for this. The financial hit must be huge.
Commies are finding out that in the market place, if you kill our children with bad food, then your warehouses become full of rotted profit loss, probably for years to come. This is huge and long lasting.
They’ll get right on this milk thing right after their toxic waterways are cleaned up.
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Wow, that is a heck of a find for this thread.
You’d think China would have been worried about the food supply when all the dogs started getting sick during the first melamine outbreak.
How about none?
“A certain amount of melamine can be tolerated, they said. “
Has melamine been around long enough for us to know what the long-term effects are? How do they know it can be “tolerated” when it took months of exposure to make those babies sick in the first place? It accumulates.
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