The discovery of excessive levels of the industrial chemical melamine in Chinese eggs has prompted the Hong Kong authorities to expand health tests to include meat products imported from China, a senior official said yesterday.
The move follows the announcement late on Saturday that Hong Kong testers had found 4.7 parts per million (ppm) of melamine in imported eggs produced by a division of China’s Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group.
The legal limit for melamine in foodstuffs in Hong Kong is 2.5ppm.
Hong Kong Secretary for Food and Health York Chow (周一嶽) said the melamine may have come from feed given to the chickens that laid the eggs.
The egg results have prompted officials to expand food testing to meat imports from China, Chow told reporters yesterday.
Chow said Hong Kong officials would step up checks of eggs imported from China.
Calls to Dalian Hanwei Enterprise Group, based in the northeastern port city Dalian, went unanswered yesterday.
In an earlier egg-related food safety scare in Hong Kong and China the banned cancer-causing industrial dye, Sudan Red, was used to color egg yolks.
ONE IN FOUR
In related news, nearly one quarter of Beijing families have fed their children milk contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine, state press reported yesterday.
In an indication of the scale of the tainted milk scandal that has rocked the country, more than 74,000 of nearly 308,000 households questioned in the capital said their children were fed the products before they were taken off the shelves, the Beijing News reported.
So far at least four infants have died in China, and 53,000 sickened across the country, from drinking milk tainted with melamine.
Normally used in making plastics and glue, melamine was added to baby milk formula and other dairy products to make them appear richer in protein.
The paper did not say how many — if any — of the fatalities occurred in Beijing.
The scandal broke early last month and has badly tarnished the image of Chinese dairy products, with countries around the world banning or curtailing Chinese imports.
DELAYS
Although at least one Chinese dairy firm knew of the problem for months, it did not immediately report it to local government officials.
They in turn delayed passing on the news for nearly a month until after the Olympics in August.
Beijing News said hospitals in the capital have reported that 3,458 infants have been hospitalized with kidney stones, the main symptom of ingesting the melamine.
More than 211,000 children have had urinary tract examinations at Beijing hospitals and medical clinics since the scandal broke, it said.
China is currently considering a draft food safety law that aims to prevent any cover-ups by health authorities while making them directly responsible for approving additives in processed foods, Xinhua news agency reported.
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