Melamine-tainted dairy products were pulled from convenience store shelves in southern China more than a year after hundreds of thousands of children had been sickened in a massive milk safety scandal, a government spokeswoman said yesterday.
The announcement calls into question the effectiveness of a crackdown launched by Chinese officials to improve product safety after a number of scandals, including the contamination of baby formula in 2008 and the recent discovery of the toxic metal cadmium in cheap jewelry.
Frozen milk products and cartons of milk dating from early last year were taken off the shelves after health inspectors tested them and found melamine, said Ling Hu, a Guizhou provincial government spokeswoman.
She said the provincial health bureau was checking to see why the products were not pulled from the shelves earlier. Calls to the Guizhou health bureau were unanswered yesterday.
Tainted products from three companies were discovered in more than a dozen convenience stores around the province, Ling said.
One of the firms, Laoting Kaida Refrigeration, was among companies named in the original melamine scandal in 2008, when six children died after drinking baby formula with melamine, used in the manufacture of plastics and fertilizer.
The China Daily newspaper quoted Wang Dingmian, former chairman of the Guangdong Provincial Dairy Association, as saying tainted milk products recalled at the time somehow made their way back onto the market. He said the latest discoveries of contaminated dairy exposed weak government regulation.
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