Fri, Sep 26, 2008 page1

• EU proposes ban on milk products

  • AGENCIES
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  The European Commission has proposed a ban on any baby food products from China that contain traces of milk.

  The EU headquarters also called for tighter checks on other Chinese food products in the wake of the health scare over the tainted milk.

  All imports of products containing more than 50 percent milk powder will have to be tested under the new rules that are to come into force today.

  The WHO and UNICEF said yesterday China’s contaminated milk powder scandal was “deplorable” as more countries in Asia and Europe banned imports of Chinese milk products.

  Beijing is battling public alarm and international dismay after close to 13,000 Chinese children crowded hospitals, ill from milk formula tainted with melamine, a cheap industrial chemical that can be used to cheat quality checks.

  “Deliberate contamination of foods intended for consumption by vulnerable infants and young children is particularly deplorable,” the WHO and UNICEF said in a joint statement.

  Meanwhile, three baby animals at the Hangzhou Safari Park near Shanghai developed kidney stones after being fed milk powder made by the Sanlu Group Co for more than a year, said a veterinarian with the Hangzhou Zhangxu Animal Hospital.

  The two orangutans and a lion cub were found with kidney stones on Wednesday after concerned officials sent them for a checkup.

  Use of the industrial chemical melamine, which has made thousands of Chinese infants sick through tainted baby formula, is rampant among farmers and feed-ingredient manufacturers, a Chinese feedmill owner said.

  “It is like a chain,” said Sun Erwu, who owns a feedmill in Hebei Province, which is at the center of the milk-powder scandal.

  “If cows are fed with poor feed and produce lower-protein milk, dairy plants will not accept the milk, so many add melamine,” Sun said on the sidelines of a grains conference.

  Nitrogen-rich melamine can be added to substandard or watered-down milk to fool quality checks, which often use nitrogen levels to measure the amount of protein in milk. The chemical is used in pesticides and in making plastics.

  “Farmers have no idea what melamine is. They only know if they add it, their milk will not be refused,” Sun said.

  Sun said he was not surprised when his meal was found to contain melamine as it was so widely used in Hebei and Shandong Province. He said he was the victim but was fined 30,000 yuan (US$4,400) nevertheless.

  “I have long wanted to test my products, but to test for melamine is expensive and it takes a long time,” he said, adding that testing one sample would cost more than 1,000 yuan — and then the laboratory cannot pinpoint the contamination to one ingredient in the meal.

  “Soymeal can be contaminated, so can corn gluten meal and cottonseed meal — suppliers add melamine into all these supplements,” Sun said.

  Adding melamine to lower protein cottonseed meal could mean a profit of 1,000 yuan more per tonne as melamine can make the protein level look as high as that of rich soymeal, he said.

  The cheating was done by milk dealers and milk-collecting stations, which add melamine to milk to increase protein level to the 3 percent requested by dairy plants, said Sun, who sells his feed to dairy cow farmers.

  Still, many farmers, who have small numbers of dairy cows, were victims as they were unaware that melamine was added by dealers at collecting stations, he said.

  Chinese officials pulled candies thought to contain contaminated milk from store shelves yesterday, echoing the expanding recalls across Asia and Europe of products ranging from yogurt to biscuits.

  Authorities yanked White Rabbit candy from shelves in Shanghai and the southern province of Hainan in the first widely known recall in China of goods other than milk products and milk.

  The Shanghai government’s quality watchdog was investigating the melamine in the White Rabbit candy, Xinhua news agency quoted the Shanghai government spokesman Chen Qiwei (陳啟偉) as saying on Wednesday.

  In Europe, France banned all food items containing Chinese milk products as a precautionary measure. The European Food Safety Authority is expected to announce this week whether processed items containing milk products from China pose a risk.

  In Asia, Vietnam and Nepal halted sales of all Chinese milk products and would now carry out stepped-up testing of such imports. Vietnam health officials warned tainted Chinese milk may have been sold in its remote, impoverished central region.
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