NYTimes Article on Melamine 10/08/2008

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.

The government has now set limits at one milligram per kilogram of infant formula and 2.5 milligrams per kilogram of liquid milk, milk powder and food products that contain more than 15 percent milk. Any dairy products with higher levels are banned. The new limits are supported by assessments by the Hong Kong government, the World Health Organization and the United Nations, the officials said.

Wang Xuening, deputy chief of the ministry’s health inspection and supervision department, said the new limits were guidance for how much unintentional seepage of melamine into food should be permitted by inspectors.

“Melamine is neither a raw food material nor a food additive,” he said. “Deliberately adding the chemical to food items is prohibited. Once such cases are spotted, they will be investigated according to law.”

Health Ministry officials at the news conference and later by telephone said they would not release an updated figure of the total number of children sickened by melamine-tainted food.

A check by The New York Times of statistics on the Web sites or official news media outlets of 8 of China’s more than 30 provinces and province-level administrative areas shows that in those 8 territories, about 52,000 people have fallen ill from tainted milk. Some of the numbers were published this month and others in September. Extrapolating from those statistics, the number sickened across all of China would be much higher than the 53,000 announced by the Health Ministry in late September.

Two lawyers representing separate cases of 1-year-old children from Henan Province who fell ill — one fatally — said by telephone Wednesday that they were awaiting word on whether local courts would hear their cases.

One lawyer, Chang Boyang, said that lawyers in Henan had been told they should tell the government if they represented any clients in the milk scandal, which amounted to a certain level of “psychological pressure,” but that there was no overt ban on working on the cases.

“We are told to report to them if anyone decides to handle a milk powder case,” he said. “But they never said we can’t do it.”