More Melamine-Tainted Milk Products Found in China

By The Associated Press | The New York Times
January 25, 2010

Melamine-tainted dairy products have been pulled from convenience store shelves in southern China more than a year after hundreds of thousands of children were sickened in a massive milk safety scandal, a government spokeswoman said Monday.

Frozen milk products and cartons of milk dating from early 2009 were taken off the shelves after health inspectors tested them and found them positive for the toxic chemical melamine, said Ling Hu, a Guizhou provincial government spokeswoman.

She said the provincial health bureau was checking to see why the products were not pulled from the shelves earlier. Calls to the Guizhou health bureau ran unanswered Monday.

Tainted products from three companies, Shandong Zibo Lusaier Dairy, Liaoning Tieling Wuzhou Food and Laoting Kaida Refrigeration, were found in more than a dozen convenience stores around the province, Ling said.

Laoting Kaida Refrigeration was among companies named in the original melamine scandal in 2008, when six children died and 300,000 were sickened after drinking baby formula contaminated with melamine, an industrial chemical used in the manufacture of plastics and fertilizer.

Investigators found that melamine, which can cause kidney stones and kidney failure, had been added to watered-down milk to fool inspectors testing for protein. Both melamine and protein are high in nitrogen. Dozens of officials, dairy executives and farmers were punished.

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