China announces permissible levels of melamine in milk
By Edward Wong


BEIJING: The Chinese Health Ministry announced on Wednesday new limits set by the government on the amount of the industrial chemical melamine to be permitted in dairy products, but it refused to provide updated statistics on the number of people who have died or fallen ill from ingesting melamine-tainted dairy products.

The announcement of the new limits is the latest move by the government to try to rebuild consumer confidence after it was revealed last month that at least three babies had died and 53,000 children had fallen ill from drinking milk products tainted with melamine.

Government officials say the melamine was added to milk products by suppliers to artificially boost protein count in milk that had been diluted. Babies and children who regularly drink the tainted milk can develop kidney stones after several months.

On Wednesday, Health Ministry officials said at a news conference that traces of melamine are found in many food products because melamine is used to make plastic, and can seep into food from packaging. A certain amount of melamine can be tolerated, they said.

The government has now set melamine limits at one milligram per kilogram of infant formula and 2.5 milligrams per kilogram of liquid milk, milk powder and food products that contain more than 15 percent milk. Any dairy products with higher levels are banned. The news limits are supported by assessments by the Hong Kong government, the World Health Organization and the United Nations, the officials said.

When asked what the previous standards were, the officials declined to give an answer and implied that there had been no limits before the milk scandal erupted last month.

Wang Xuening, the deputy chief of the ministry's health inspection and supervision department, said the new limits act as guidance for how much unintentional seepage of melamine into food can be permitted by inspectors.

People who purposefully add melamine to food will be prosecuted, he said.

"Melamine is neither a raw food material nor a food additive," he said. "Deliberately adding the chemical to food items is prohibited. Once such cases are spotted, they will be investigated according to law."

The officials were asked by reporters to give updated statistics on the number of people made sick by tainted food, but a ministry spokesman, Deng Haihua, said he could not do that at the news conference. Later, a ministry employee said by telephone that the statistics were not authorized for release.

In late September, the ministry reported the figures on the deaths and illnesses from drinking tainted milk products. At the time, 13,000 children were hospitalized, it said. Since then, the government has not released any new statistics.

Before that announcement, Xinhua, the official news agency, reported that an infant in the western region of Xinjiang had died from melamine ingestion, but the ministry has not confirmed it. The latest news reports from Xinhua put the number of deaths at three.

A scan by The New York Times of statistics on the Web sites or official news media outlets of eight of China's more than 30 provinces and provincial-level administrative areas shows that in those eight territories, about 52,000 people have fallen ill from tainted milk. Some of the numbers were published in early October and others in late September. Extrapolating from those statistics, the number sickened across all of China would be much higher than the 53,000 announced by the Health Ministry in late September.

Two lawyers representing separate cases of one-year-old children from Henan Province who fell ill said by telephone on Wednesday that they were awaiting word on whether local courts would hear their cases.

One lawyer, Chang Boyang, said lawyers in Henan had been told they should inform the government if they represent any clients in the milk scandal, which amounts to a certain level of "psychological pressure," but that there was no overt ban on working on the cases. "We are told to report to them if anyone decides to handle a milk powder case," he said. "But they never said we can't do it."

Huang Yuanxi and Zhang Jing contributed research.

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