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Chinese dairy giants lead media on tour of factories

China’s dairy giants opened their factories to a government-led media tour in a bid to stave off losses and regain the public’s trust after their products were found tainted with a chemical that killed four infants and sickened tens of thousands.

Executives from Mengniu Dairy Group Co and Yili Industrial Group Co — both based in Inner Mongolia, where sprawling grasslands serve as grazing land to some 2.5 million cows — promised on Thursday that stepped up testing and new procedures would ensure that similar contamination won’t happen again.

Together the companies control more than half of China’s dairy market.

“Provide 100 percent safety to consumers,” read a slogan on a red banner in the spotless processing and packaging hall at Yili’s headquarters in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia.

The media tour on Thursday was part of a joint effort by the government and the dairy industry to contain the fallout after baby formula contaminated with melamine was blamed for the deaths of four infants and the sickening of about 54,000 other children in China.

The Health Ministry said on Wednesday that 5,800 children were still hospitalized — six of them in serious condition.

Authorities blame middlemen at milk collecting stations for the food safety scandal that began last month, saying they added melamine to watered-down milk to fool quality control tests and make the product appear rich in protein.

Nitrogen-rich melamine, a chemical used to make plastics and fertilizers, can cause kidney stones as the body tries to eliminate it and, in extreme cases, lead to life-threatening kidney failure.

Infants are particularly susceptible.

At Yili headquarters, reporters were shown a new station for melamine testing where workers wearing lab coats and gloves used testing equipment they said cost the company US$15 million to import from the US and Japan.

“After this incident, we have increased melamine checks on all raw milk supplies [and] only that which passes the tests goes into the factory,” Yili executive president Zhang Jianqiu (張劍秋) said. “All of Yili’s products on the markets for sale ... meet the standards.”
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