Made in China is a Toxic word : The Portrait of a Toxic Olympic Host --
Chinese parents panic over tainted milk
Chinese parents panic over tainted milk
Published: September 19 2008 18:00 | Last updated: September 19 2008 18:00
Fu Mingxiong squats against a wall in the sun outside Shanghai
Children’s Hospital, dangling his three-month-old son in split trousers
over a plastic beaker.
The scene is being repeated all over China as anxious parents rush to
overburdened hospitals to have their children’s urine tested for
indications of kidney stones and other illnesses caused by ingesting
melamine.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/66084a16-4b49-11dc-861a-0000779fd2ac.html
Timeline:
Counterfeighting in China
A list of China-related product recalls in the past two years
Dairy suppliers scrimping on costs by diluting milk content in their
products use melamine to make protein levels appear normal.
China’s senior product quality regulator announced Friday that 10 per
cent of liquid milk samples from two leading dairy brands, Mengniu and
Yili, had tested positive for melamine, vastly expanding the scope of
potential victims and the impact on the $19bn (EUR13bn, ?10bn) dairy
industry. Some samples from Bright Dairy also failed the test.
Over the past week China’s tainted milk crisis has soared in medical,
political and commercial significance, spreading from a single brand of
tainted milk powder to more than 20 others and on to liquid milk and
other dairy products.
“We believe the whole Chinese dairy sector will be significantly
impacted as Mengniu, Yili and Bright Dairy in total had more than 60 per
cent market share in 2007,” Lei Chen, a UBS dairy analyst, said in a
research note.
Four infants have died from drinking melamine-laced infant powder. By
midweek, when the government stopped issuing statistics on sick babies,
over 6,000 had been taken ill.
Mr Fu worries that his infant son might be one of them, though he has
not shown any symptoms. A roadside vegetable seller from Henan province,
Mr Fu fed his son Sanlu milk powder, the down-market brand first
identified as tainted.
Hundreds of other parents at Shanghai Children’s Hospital share the same
worry. Xu Xiu brought her 10- month-old son for testing even though he
drank imported rice formula.
Ms Xu laughs in embarrassment after she emerges from the hospital’s
hastily erected “problem milk powder” clinic: “I know rice powder is OK
but I still want to make sure my son is healthy.” Her concern
illustrates the way that panic can spread, undermining public confidence
in the government. The crisis has affected everyone from middle-class
families who consume a lot of dairy products to migrant workers from
inland provinces whose infants cannot breastfeed because they are looked
after by relatives.
Mr Fu and Ms Xu dodge the question of who is to blame. But on Friday a
senior European Union official said he wanted an explanation. “We are
continuing to discuss with our Chinese counterparts who knew what and
when,” said Robert Madelin, the European Commission’s director-general
for health and consumers, who was in Beijing to announce the launch of a
“joint US-EU-China initiative on consumer product safety compliance”.
EU states are being urged carefully to inspect imports from China that
could include dairy products. The EU does not import Chinese infant
formula. Singapore banned all Chinese dairy imports on Friday.
Some Chinese online comments have accused the government of covering up
the contamination, possibly to avoid embarrassment during the Olympics.
The New Zealand government has said Chinese officials failed to heed
warnings from Fonterra, the New Zealand dairy giant that owns 43 per
cent of Sanlu, that there was a problem.
The crisis raises questions of China’s ability to tighten product safety
standards, despite earlier scandals over exports of tainted pet food and
lead-laced toys.
“The local authorities almost certainly turned a blind eye to obvious
bad practice, and the central authorities ... failed completely to
police existing regulations, improve those regulations and enforce
stricter testing requirements,” said Matthew Crabbe of Access Asia, a
market research firm in Shanghai.
But with the vast majority of raw milk coming from family farms,
policing the fragmented supply chain could be difficult, analysts said.
Additional reporting by Teresa Yan
Poisoned past
April 2004 Thirteen babies died of malnutrition in Chinese province of
Anhui, after being fed fake baby formula found to have little
nutritional value that caused infants’ heads to swell.
October 2006 In Panama 115 people died after taking cough syrup with
diethylene glyco in it, a chemical used in antifreeze. A Chinese factory
claimed DEG was pure glycerin.
March 2007 US company Menu Foods recalled 60m containers of pet food
linked to the deaths of thousands of dogs and cats. The fatalities were
traced to melamine in Chinese-imported wheat gluten and rice protein.
May-August 2007 Authorities in more than a dozen countries recall
imported Chinese toothpaste after concerns the paste contained DEG.
June 2007 The US Food and Drug Administration banned imports of fish
from China after farmed seafood contained “drugs and unsafe food additives”.
January 2008 At least 10 Japanese became ill after eating frozen
dumplings from China that were found to contain pesticide. Japanese
officials later said the dumplings had also been linked to food
poisoning cases in China.
January 2008 US pharmaceutical company Baxter withdrew Chinese-made
batches of the blood-thinning drug heparin after 81 patients died. The
deaths were linked to the presence of a substitute chemical.
September 2008 Four Chinese infants have died and at least 6,000 more
are ill after consuming melamine-contaminated baby milk powder.
Singapore has banned Chinese dairy imports.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
