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This is not one of my usual blog posts, but having two little kids who use milk powder everyday, it's too close to the heart and too important. You probably heard about the recent milk powder scandal in China: Many milk products contain Melamine which can cause severe damage, e.g. kidney failure.
The Hong Kong Centre for Food Safety (a government body) has been testing several dairy products: Here is a link where you can get the latest informations about safe and contaminated products.
Apart from some Chinese companies, this also lists one product of corporate giant Nestle. Only a small amount of Melamine has been found in the Nestle product, but this is still worrying.
About Melamine
Here some excerpts from the Wikipedia article:
[...]
Ingestion of melamine may lead to reproductive damage, or bladder or kidney stones, which can lead to bladder cancer.[15][20][21][22][23]
[...]
Melamine may have been added to fool government quality tests after water was added to fraudulently increase the milk's volume. The adulterant melamine was added to the milk to allow the company to dilute the milk with water and circumvent government regulations, since melamine will cause a false increase in the measurement of protein by increasing the nitrogen levels in the milk.[51] [52] Officials estimate that about 20 percent of the dairy companies tested in China sell products tainted with melamine.[53]
About the milk scandal
First I found it quite unbelievable how people can be so scroupulous too sell contaminated milk, and this is not the first time in China, just in 2004 some people sold fake milk powder which killed dozends of infants.
This time it seems sellers of fresh milk added some Melamine to their milk, so it seems to have a higher protein level. They could dilute the milk and sell therefore higher quantities.
The factories who bought the fresh milk and used this to produce milk powder and other dairy products, either didn't check for Melamine, didn't bother to check or just didn't care.
So far 19 people have been arrested all involved in the supply chain of raw milk. Nobody from the companies who sold the milk has been arrested so far. [Wikipedia]
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