BEIJING (AP) — China’s Communist Party has punished eight more senior government officials for their roles in last year’s tainted infant formula scandal, a state news agency reported Friday.

Milk laced with the industrial chemical melamine was blamed for the deaths of at least six babies and the sickening of nearly 300,000 others. The scandal forced the head of China’s quality watchdog to resign, and courts have sentenced two men to death for producing the chemical and supplying dairies with toxic milk.

The crisis also highlighted the need for major overhauls in China’s food safety system, and led to a law enacted this month that consolidates hundreds of separate regulations covering the country’s 500,000 food processing companies.

The official Xinhua News Agency said the Communist Party’s disciplinary body removed Wang Bubu, chief of the law enforcement and supervision department at China’s quality watchdog, from his official and party posts. A deputy chief of food circulation supervision at the State Administration for Industry and Commerce was also fired, it said.

Six others — from agencies including the State Food and Drug Administration and the Ministries of Agriculture and Health — received penalties including demotions and having their misdeeds recorded, Xinhua said. Xinhua said all were punished for their failures in supervising.

Several senior city officials were fired last year in Shijiazhuang, the northern Chinese city where the dairy at the heart of the scandal was based. The chairwoman of the company has been sentenced to life in prison.

The scandal has been blamed on middlemen who added melamine, which is high in nitrogen, to watered-down milk to fool quality tests for protein content. Melamine can cause kidney stones and kidney failure.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

By ANITA CHANG
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) — Families whose children fell ill from tainted milk have come under pressure to drop compensation lawsuits, victims’ advocates said Tuesday, showing the government’s lingering uneasiness over one of China’s worst contamination scandals.

Local officials were calling and visiting at least a half-dozen families, urging them to drop their cases against the dairies and accept a government-sanctioned compensation plan giving 2,000 yuan ($290) to most victims, said Zhao Lianhai, the father of a child sickened by the milk.

At least one family has decided to back out of their lawsuit, said Zhao, who has rallied other families through a Web site he created.

“One parent told me, ‘I’m more than 30 years old but I’ve never before seen the county and village officials. Everyone in the family is really scared,’” said Lu Jun, an AIDS activist who has been working with families of tainted milk victims in central China’s Henan province.

Infant formula contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine was blamed for killing at least six babies and sickening nearly 300,000 across China in the scandal that began in September.

Unscrupulous middlemen are accused of adding melamine, which is high in nitrogen, to watered-down milk to fool quality tests for protein content. When ingested, melamine can cause kidney stones and kidney failure.

The scandal rocked the country, culminating in a law enacted in recent weeks that consolidates hundreds of disparate regulations covering the country’s 500,000 food processing companies.

The accusations that local officials are trying to intimidate victim’s families come despite this month’s announcement by the executive vice president of China’s highest court, Shen Deyong, that parents who rejected the government’s compensation plan were welcome to file lawsuits against the dairies.

It was not clear why local officials would try to stop the families after Shen’s announcement. But different levels of government in China often disagree on how to handle matters, and local officials may see lawsuits as a threat to their authority with the potential to upset stability in their community.

More than 600 families have demanded higher compensation than the government plan offers — one-time payouts using money from dairies named in the scandal. Families that take the money can’t sue for more unless they can prove they were forced to agree to the compensation plan, lawyers have said.

Wang Zhenping, whose 1 1/2-year-old son became ill after drinking contaminated infant formula, said he has received four phone calls from health bureau officials in Henan’s Zhoukou city in the last two weeks. They also have visited his mother’s house twice.

“The last time they called me, I told them to call my lawyer,” he said, planning to continue his legal fight against Sanlu, the dairy at the center of the crisis.

Phones at the Zhoukou city health bureau rang unanswered Tuesday.

Lawyers representing the victims’ families have also run into obstacles in recent days.

Li Jinglin, an attorney who was representing parents of children sickened by Shengyuan brand infant formula, said the Beijing city justice bureau called his law firm last Friday and told his superiors he should not be working on the case. Li said he withdrew from the case but hoped another lawyer could take his spot.

A coalition of lawyers working to sue the 22 dairies named in the scandal is focused primarily on getting at least one case involving the key dairy Sanlu to be accepted by a court in the northern city of Shijiazhuang.

“We just want the courts to accept at least one case as an example,” lawyer Lin Zheng said.

___

Associated Press researcher Xi Yue in Beijing contributed to this report.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

By AUDRA ANG
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese health officials are investigating a growing number of cases of kidney stones in babies, state media said Thursday, months after a tainted milk scandal in which hundreds of thousands of children who drank melamine-contaminated formula suffered similar ailments.

While the Health Ministry has not directly linked the new cases to dairy products, parents are blaming formula made by Dumex Baby Food Co. Ltd., a subsidiary of France’s Groupe Danone SA. Dumex insists that its products are safe, and health officials said tests showed they are free of melamine, an industrial chemical.

The China Daily newspaper said Thursday that the Health Ministry has asked all local health bureaus to begin epidemiological research on kidney problems in children, including checking their eating habits and living environment.

“We’re trying to find out why the number of kidney ailments among babies has risen drastically,” Ma Yangchen of the ministry’s press office was quoted as saying. The report did not say how many children have become sick, when they became ill or what triggered the investigation.

A woman who answered the telephone at the Health Ministry said there was no official statement on the matter.

The ministry’s investigation reflects government efforts to restore public confidence after milk tainted with melamine, used in the production of plastics and fertilizer, was linked to the deaths last year of at least six Chinese babies and illnesses of nearly 300,000 others.

The scandal, which unfolded in September, was one of the country’s worst food contamination crises. It involved the products of China’s biggest dairies and underscored the government’s problems with policing product quality.

State media have said that officials started looking into Dumex because of overseas media reports last month that about 48 Chinese babies suffered kidney-related illnesses after drinking the company’s milk. It did not identify the reports.

Dumex has insisted that all its products are safe. The Shanghai Municipal Bureau of Quality and Technical Supervision said over the weekend it had tested 932 batches of dairy products produced by the Danone subsidiary since mid-September “and all are melamine-free.”

It also said no melamine was found in more than 1,700 batches produced before mid-September, when the dairy scandal broke.

Dumex’s main China office in Shanghai had no immediate comment Thursday.

Jiang Yalin, a mother in the southwestern province of Guizhou and the leader of a parents’ group, said her daughter drank only Dumex milk after she turned 1 and fell sick about two months later. She cried constantly at night, even in her sleep, and started having problems urinating, Jiang said.

When Jiang took her daughter to the hospital in September after reading about the tainted milk scandal, doctors said the child had stones as big as rice grains in both her kidneys.

“I was stunned. I felt helpless and angry,” Jiang said in a telephone interview.

The girl has since recovered and Jiang says doctors have declared her healthy.

Jiang said she has compiled a list of more than 100 babies — the youngest only a couple of months old — who fell sick after drinking Dumex and may file a suit against the company.

“I must figure out what exactly it was that harmed my daughter. I must know,” Jiang said.

___

Associated Press researcher Xi Yue contributed to this report.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

BEIJING (AP) — A Chinese court plans to auction off the assets of the Chinese dairy at the heart of a tainted milk scandal that sickened hundreds of thousands of children and was blamed for killing six, reports said Saturday.

Sanlu Group Co. was declared bankrupt by a court in its north China base of Shijiazhuang on Thursday. Its real estate holdings, buildings and equipment will be auctioned March 4, along with its investment rights and interests in three other dairy companies, newspapers and the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

Fonterra, a New Zealand farmer-owned cooperative that owns 43 percent of Sanlu, has already written off its $139 million investment. Fonterra was responsible for alerting Chinese authorities about the tainted milk scandal last August.

Sanlu was one of 22 Chinese dairy companies whose products were found to contain high levels of the industrial chemical melamine, which led to the deaths of six babies and caused 294,000 others to suffer urinary problems, according to the government.

At least a dozen lawsuits have been filed against state-owned Sanlu, but they are caught in a legal limbo as courts have neither accepted nor refused the cases — a sign of the scandal’s political sensitivity.

The scandal highlighted a widespread practice among dairy suppliers of watering down milk they bought from farmers and then adding melamine to it to artificially boost its apparent protein levels. The tainted milk was then sold to dairy companies.

Courts have sentenced more than 20 people for adulterating milk or failing to respond to the tainting, including Sanlu’s former general manager and chairwoman Tian Wenhua, who was given a life sentence. Tian, 66, has appealed.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

By TINI TRAN
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) — Chinese parents whose children were sickened after drinking contaminated milk pushed the government for greater accountability and compensation Friday, a day after a court handed down two death penalties and long prison terms for 19 other defendants.

Milk formula laced with the industrial chemical melamine has been blamed for causing the deaths of at least six infants and sickening nearly 300,000 others with kidney stones and other problems.

Zhao Lianhai, a parent who has rallied families through a Web site he created that details the crisis, said Friday that he and three others were presenting a petition to the Ministry of Health.

The petition, signed by some 550 parents, calls for free medical care and follow-up services for all victims, reimbursement for treatment already paid for, and further research into the long-term health effects of melamine among other demands.

“Children are the future of every family, and moreover, they are the future of this country,” the petition said. “As consumers, we have been greatly damaged.”

But state television reported Friday that most of the families had accepted payouts offered by the 22 dairies responsible for the contamination under a government-led plan.

The report is indicative of the communist leadership’s eagerness to bring an end to the embarrassing scandal. It also appeared to be trying to portray parents who were rejecting the payments as out of step with the majority.

Jiang Yaling, a parent from Guizhou, said the parents who are asking for a better deal held a meeting with several Health Ministry officials on Friday. She said the officials pledged to “respect our petition” and process it quickly.

“It’s not a matter of what the officials say to us, but it’s a matter of what they do. If these demands are not met, my child could have a life span of only 10 years. What kind of life is that? My child is my everything,” Jiang said.

The Health Ministry did not immediately respond to a faxed list of questions from The Associated Press.

Jiang said the group also planned to submit the same petition to the China Dairy Association and China’s food safety regulators later in the day.

The 22 dairy companies involved in the scandal have proposed a 1.1 billion yuan ($160 million) compensation plan. Families whose children died would receive 200,000 yuan ($29,000), while others would receive 30,000 yuan ($4,380) for serious cases of kidney stones and 2,000 yuan ($290) for less severe cases.

The China Dairy Association said the distribution of compensation payments was nearly complete, and that than 262,000 families — or 90 percent of the official total — had accepted the dairies’ offers by Thursday, CCTV reported.

Calls to the dairy association rang unanswered.

Many parents who rejected the compensation payments say they were inadequate and complained that the plan did not have the families’ input.

On Thursday, 21 defendants blamed in the milk scandal were sentenced, including the former general manager and chairwoman of Sanlu Group Co., the dairy at the center of the scandal.

Tian Wenhua, 66, the highest-ranking executive charged in the food safety crisis, was given life imprisonment while three other company executives got sentences between five and 15 years.

Investigations showed that middlemen who sold milk to dairy companies including Sanlu were watering down raw milk, then mixing in melamine to make it appear to have a higher protein content.

One of those middlemen, Geng Jinping, who supplied hundreds of tons of melamine-tainted milk to Sanlu, was sentenced to death. Also condemned was Zhang Yujun, who ran a workshop that produced melamine-tainted powder branded as protein powder.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

By GILLIAN WONG
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) — More than 200 families whose babies fell ill after drinking tainted infant formula said Monday they are taking their case to China’s highest court after being repeatedly ignored by lower courts.

The lawsuit involving 213 families poses a challenge to the government’s attempts to end one of the country’s worst food safety crises. The scandal over milk spiked with an industrial chemical has been blamed for the deaths of six babies and the sickening of nearly 300,000 others with kidney stones and kidney failure.

The 22 Chinese dairies involved have proposed a 1.1 billion yuan ($160 million) compensation plan, but many parents want higher compensation and long-term treatment for their babies.

“The reason why I’m bringing this case to court is not about money but about my child’s future,” said Zhang Ge, a single mother in Beijing who quit her job at an Internet advertising company to look after her sick son.

Beijing attorney Xu Zhiyong said lawyers for the families mailed an application Friday to the Supreme People’s Court in Beijing to sue the dairies.

But it seemed unlikely the court would hear the lawsuit, given that lower courts have so far refused to hear at least a dozen lawsuits in the politically sensitive scandal.

The lawyers’ group has not been notified if the application has been received. Phone calls to the inquiry office of the Supreme People’s Court rang unanswered Monday.

The government and the dairy companies had hoped the nationwide payout scheme would ease public anger. Instead, it has given embittered, outspoken parents across the country a common cause.

Xu said the lawsuit seeks 36 million yuan ($5.3 million) in total compensation for the families. It also demands payment of medical expenses incurred from tainted milk-related problems for the rest of the victims’ lives.

“The compensation being offered is just too little,” Xu said in a phone interview. “The parents are also not happy about the plan to give free medical care only till 18 years of age.”

Previous applications to sue Sanlu Group Co., the dairy at the center of the scandal, in lower courts in Hebei, where the company is based, were ignored, Xu said.

Investigations have found that milk suppliers added melamine, which like protein is rich in nitrogen, to watered-down milk to fool quality tests for protein content. Melamine, a chemical used to make plastics and fertilizers, can cause kidney stones and kidney failure.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

By HENRY SANDERSON
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) — A court on Monday refused to accept a lawsuit filed against a Chinese dairy by dozens of families who said their children were sickened or killed by tainted milk, lawyers involved in the case said.

The 63 defendants in the first-known group lawsuit stemming from the scandal, including the parents of two children who died, were seeking nearly 14 million yuan ($2 million) in compensation from state-owned Sanlu Group Co., Beijing-based lawyer Xu Zhiyong said.

The dairy based in the northern Chinese city of Shijiazhuang was at the center of China’s worst food safety crisis in years, in which six babies are believed to have died and nearly 300,000 became sick with urinary problems after drinking infant formula tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Three of six defense lawyers presented the suit to the Hebei Supreme Court’s registry office on Monday but were told it could not be accepted because government departments were still investigating.

“We think it was their excuse for not accepting the case. We will continue to push the case and give them pressure,” said activist lawyer Li Fangping, who helped organize the case.

The court in Hebei, the province where Sanlu is based, took the documents, lawyers said.

“We presented our documents and we expressed our concern. We will keep contacting them to see what’s the progress,” attorney Lan Zhixue said.

China’s Health Ministry acknowledged last week that six babies likely died, twice the previous figure, and 294,000 babies suffered urinary problems from drinking contaminated infant formula, a six-fold increase from its last tally in September.

The government has said that Sanlu knew as early as last year that its products were tainted with melamine and that company and local officials first tried to cover it up.

Like a number of major dairies, Sanlu was said to have excellent quality controls that allowed it to enjoy a government-granted inspection-exempt status.

So far there has been no word on compensation for the sick babies, apart from an offer of free medical care. At least a dozen individual cases have been filed against Sanlu but are caught in a legal limbo, while lawyers who have volunteered to help families have been pressured to drop their work.

Courts often turn down group suits, preferring to deal one-by-one with cases to appear more productive and avoid running afoul of Communist Party officials, who ultimately control the judiciary.

Hearing a group case on tainted milk would also bring sensitive issues of culpability out in court. The central government said it only learned of the scandal Sept. 8 — it does not say how — even though inspection, health and other government departments in Hebei province and Beijing knew earlier.

The lawyers were told by the Shijiazhuang prosecutor’s office that criminal cases involving Sanlu milk were still being discussed and have not begun to be prosecuted.

The suit lays out eight compensation packages, depending on the severity of illness, and seeks a total of 6.82 million yuan ($991,000) for medical fees, cost of food and transportation fees for the group, as well as 6.91 million yuan ($1 million) for psychological damage.

Xu said there were two cases of deaths among the claimants, one in Henan province and another in Gansu province.

The illnesses of so many children highlighted the widespread practice of adding melamine — often used in manufacturing plastics — to watered-down milk to fool protein tests. Melamine is rich in nitrogen, which registers as protein on many routine tests.

Though melamine is not believed to be harmful in tiny amounts, higher concentrations produce kidney stones, which can block the ducts that carry urine from the body, and in serious cases can cause kidney failure.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

By CHARLES HUTZLER
Associated Press Writer

LITI VILLAGE, China (AP) _ Li Xiaokai died of kidney failure on the old wooden bed in the family farmhouse, just before dawn on a drizzly Sept. 10.

Her grandmother wrapped the 9-month-old in a wool blanket. Her father handed the body to village men for burial by a muddy creek. The doctors and family never knew why she got sick. A day later, state media reported that the type of infant formula she drank had been adulterated with an industrial chemical.

Yet the deaths of Xiaokai and at least four other babies are not included in China’s official death toll from its worst food safety scare in years. The Health Ministry’s count stands at only three deaths.

The stories of these uncounted babies suggest that China’s tainted milk scandal has exacted a higher human toll than the government has so far acknowledged. Without an official verdict on the deaths, families worry they will be unable to bring lawsuits and refused compensation.

So far, nobody is suggesting large numbers of deaths are being concealed. But so many months passed before the scandal was exposed that it’s likely more babies fell sick or died than official figures reflect.

Beijing’s apparent reluctance to admit a higher toll is reinforcing perceptions that the authoritarian government cares more about tamping down criticism than helping families. Lawyers, doctors and reporters have said privately that authorities pressured them to not play up the human cost or efforts to get compensation from the government or Sanlu, the formula maker.

“It’s hard to say how the government will handle this matter,” said Zhang Xinkui, a Beijing-based lawyer amassing evidence of the contamination for a possible lawsuit. “There may be many children who perhaps died from drinking Sanlu powdered milk or perhaps from a different cause. But there’s no system in place to find out.”

In the weeks since Xiaokai’s death, her father and his older brother have talked to lawyers and beseeched health officials, with no result.

“My heart is in pain,” said her father, Li Xiaoquan, a short, taciturn farmer with hooded eyes. From a corner of his farmhouse courtyard in central China’s wheat and corn flatlands, he pulls a worn green box that once held apples and is now stuffed with empty pink wrappers of the Sanlu Infant Formula Milk Powder that Xiaokai nursed on. “We think someone, the company, should compensate us.”

In coal-mining country 450 miles (725 kilometers) to the northwest, Tian Xiaowei waits for his wife to leave their newly built house before removing five small photos of a wide-eyed baby boy from a brown plastic document folder. “She breaks down when she sees them,” Tian said. The photos are the only mementos left of year-old Tian Jin, who died in August.

“I want these people who poisoned the milk powder to receive the severest punishment under law. I want an explanation and I want consolation for my dead child,” said Tian, a broad-shouldered apple farmer and part-time truck driver. “I feel like we could die from regret. If we knew that it was contaminated, we would never have fed him that.”

Since September, when the scandal was first reported, Beijing has said that Shijiazhuang Sanlu Group Co., the dairy, knew as early as last year that its products were tainted with melamine and that company and local officials first tried to cover it up.

The government has promised free medical treatment to the 50,000 children sickened, and unspecified compensation to them and families of the dead. The Health Ministry, which is coordinating the government’s response, declined to answer questions about the compensation plan and whether it was investigating deaths and illnesses not yet counted by the government.

Melamine, a chemical used as a flame retardant and binding agent to make cooking utensils and industrial coatings, is rich in nitrogen. As such, it makes an attractive low-cost additive to milk and other foods; nitrogen registers as protein on many routine tests.

Though melamine is not believed harmful in tiny amounts, higher concentrations produce kidney stones, which can block the ducts that carry urine from the body, and in serious cases can cause kidney failure.

All eight babies who died were diagnosed with kidney failure, according to the families, medical records or state media accounts. All also supposedly drank Sanlu infant formula or powdered milk.

The fathers of Li Xiaokai and Tian Jin both wave inch-thick sheaves of medical reports and tests from their children’s stays in hospitals. Xiaokai, a twin older than her sister Xiaoyan by three minutes, was fed with Sanlu formula while the younger girl nursed on breast milk because their mother did not have enough for both, family members said.

An ultrasound examination of Xiaokai’s kidneys at the Zhengzhou Children’s Hospital on Aug. 21 found a stone in each kidney that was about the size of a small marble and 2½ times larger than what doctors consider a critical threshold.

Tian Xiaowei, the apple farmer, sent bags of Sanlu infant formula to a government laboratory in September. The Xi’an Product Quality Supervision Institute’s report, dated Oct. 8, found melamine levels of 1,748 milligrams per kilogram, more than 800 times the government-set limit.

Then there’s Wang Siyu, the daughter of an accountant and proprietor of an Internet cafe in the central city of Shangqiu. Siyu was fed Sanlu products from birth and developed recurring kidney problems in May last year, at age 3, said her mother, Li Songmei.

Twice hospitalized, she was taken off Sanlu milk and started to recover, only to fall ill again when the family began to give her Sanlu products, Li said. Sick for a third time and swollen, she died of kidney failure at the Zhengzhou Children’s Hospital on May 2, said Li.

“Ever since she was born, she had been using Sanlu milk. Only when she felt sick and couldn’t eat did she stop taking Sanlu,” said Li.

Others among the five include an infant in far western Xinjiang province, whose story was posted on the provincial government Web site, and a 6-month-old boy in southeastern Jiangxi province, reported by the New Legal Daily. A reporter who worked on the article and would give only his surname, Liu, said the newspaper was careful not to blame Cai Cong’s death on Sanlu formula because “the local government has not yet reached a verdict.”

Medical experts say kidney stones in infants are rare. Doctors in several parts of China first noticed a rise in cases in the past two years. Pediatric urologist Feng Dongchuan tried to sound an alarm, posting an item on his blog in July about a spike in cases at his hospital in the central city of Xuzhou and in nearby Nanjing city. Feng pinpointed infant formula as the likely cause.

Feng at first refused requests for interviews, then responded in a terse e-mail: “The chance for infants or small children to come down with kidney stones is very small, and having stones that obstruct both kidneys is even more rare.”

Like the others, the Li family grew distressed when Xiaokai started to become fussy in July. With their two-acre (8,000-square-meter) farm in Liti Village, her parents never had much money and already had a child, a son. But they wanted a larger family, bucking the one-child family planning limits. Xiaokai was “the more active” of the twins, said her 70-year-old grandmother, Li Xuan.

By August, Xiaokai was running a high fever, unabated by ever higher doses of medicine. Alarmed after she stopped eating and urinating, the family took her to the nearby Runnan county hospital on Aug. 18. The doctors diagnosed kidney failure and rushed her overnight by ambulance to Zhengzhou Children’s Hospital, three hours away and the best in Henan province.

“They knew right away,” said the father, Li. Xiaokai was run thr
ough tests and put on intravenous solutions to try to shrink the kidney stones. Unable to stay with her or afford a hotel, Li and his mother slept on the pavement outside the hospital. After five days, the hospital said it could do no more.

“The doctors wouldn’t operate because they said ‘she’s too small,’” said Li. They suggested taking Xiaokai to Beijing or Shanghai. Hospital officials declined comment and refused to make Xiaokai’s doctor available.

The hospital stay in Zhengzhou cost 7,331 yuan, or $1,070 — about a year’s cash income for the family — and they had already borrowed money to pay for Xiaokai’s care.

So Li brought Xiaokai home to die. They took her to a traditional medicine doctor in the village, who gave her an herbal medicine and confirmed the grim prognosis. “The old doctor told us ‘the child will die in 10 to 18 days,’” Li said.

Early on Sept. 10 while it was still dark, the grandmother called Li into the side room where she and Xiaokai slept. “Her stomach was puffy” — a sign of kidney failure — “and she wasn’t breathing,” he said.

In many parts of north China, the death of a child is considered a misfortune that can bring bad luck on a family and is best suppressed. Accordingly, Li Haiqin, a cousin, and three other men took Xiaokai to a creek on the far side of the village fields. They put a brick in the blanket with the body and placed it in a shallow hole under a path between rows of poplar trees. Then they walked back in silence beneath a gray dawn and a light rain. No close family members were there and none was told where the grave is.

Xiaokai’s family says Beijing had waived regular inspections of Sanlu because its quality controls were said to be excellent. “The government should shoulder its responsibility. This was a national brand, inspection-exempt products,” said Xiaokai’s uncle, Li Shenyi.

Since the death, Li Shenyi approached the Runnan county Health Bureau to classify Xiaokai’s death as caused by tainted formula. “They said the upper levels (of government) were working on it,” he said.

The county health bureau referred calls to its supervisors in Zhumadian city, who said ultimately it was up to Beijing.

“Right now, the Health Ministry has no clear explanation on how the victim’s families should be compensated,” said a Ms. Shang at the Zhumadian Health Bureau’s medical affairs office. “Nobody knows.”

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

HONG KONG (AP) _ Macau authorities say three more children in the Chinese gambling enclave have developed kidney stones that may be linked to Chinese milk contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine.

A government statement says the three girls aged from 4 to 8 are in stable condition and do not require hospitalization.

The Monday statement says the children attend schools where authorities provide students with free milk produced by Yili Industrial Group Co.

Yili is one of several Chinese dairies implicated in a scandal on the mainland in which melamine-laced dairy products have killed four infants and sickened more than 50,000.

Melamine is used to make plastics and fertilizer.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

By GILLIAN WONG
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) _ First it was baby milk formula. Then, dairy-based products from yogurt to chocolate.

Now chicken eggs have been contaminated with melamine, and an admission by state-run media that the industrial chemical is regularly added to animal feed in China is fueling fears the problem could be more widespread, affecting fish, meat and who knows what else.

Peter Dingle, a toxicity expert at Murdoch University in Perth, Australia, said, however, that aside from the tainted baby formula that killed at least four Chinese infants and left 54,000 children hospitalized just over a month ago, it is unlikely humans will get sick from melamine.

The amount of the chemical in a few servings of bacon, for instance, would simply be too low, he said.

But Dingle and others said China should have cracked down sooner on feed companies that have boosted their earnings by fortifying their products with the chemical, which is normally used in the manufacture of plastic and fertilizers.

Rich in nitrogen, melamine gives low-quality food and feed artificially high protein readings.

“Traders can make a lot of profit by doing it,” said Jason Yan, the U.S. Grains Council’s technical director in Beijing.

Extremely high levels of melamine — as found in the Chinese baby formula — can cause kidney stones, and in extreme cases can bring on life-threatening kidney failure.

But while scientists say it’s not dangerous to ingest small amounts, they cannot be definitive because there have been no tests on melamine’s effects in humans. Until the contaminated baby formula became public in September, there was never any reason to.

That leaves consumers worldwide, particularly parents, worried about food products from China, and even those made elsewhere with ingredients imported from Chinese companies.

Among those not taking any chances is Pranee Suankaew, a homemaker in Bangkok, Thailand.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” the 37-year-old mother said as she tugged her 4-year-old away from the candy aisle where he eagerly eyed a bag of M&Ms.; “We’re getting you fruit and a lollipop. There’s no milk in that.”

She said she usually gives in to avoid tantrums. “But this time, I told him, no, no, no.”

Experts say melamine sometimes accidentally leaches into the food supply in low levels, from things like plastic dinnerware. It can also seep in from some pesticides and fertilizers.

But in China it’s become clear that the chemical is deliberately added.

The baby formula set off a global recall of foods made with Chinese dairy products and sparked raids in supermarkets across Asia. Twelve truckloads of candy, yogurt and other dairy-based goods were burned in Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, just this week.

In light of Wednesday reports by state media on the widespread use of the chemical in animal feed, health experts say the government clearly knew melamine was being added for more than a year, since contaminated dog food made it to markets in North America, but didn’t crack down on producers as promised.

With the scandal escalating, Chinese leaders are now desperate to clean up the country’s image, making dozens of arrests in recent weeks and firing local and even high-level officials for negligence.

John Chapple, a Singapore-based adviser to Sinoanalytica, a food analysis laboratory in the Chinese city of Qingdao, said the decision to allow state media to report on the years of melamine use seems to show the government is ready to be more active in dealing with food safety.

“However, one is not going to change a hierarchical government system overnight,” he added. “It is usually going to be slow to start to react to a crisis, but quick to finally nail it.”

Though China has vowed to boost inspections for melamine contamination, it will be difficult to monitor the countless small, illegally operating manufacturers found across the country, other experts said.

“It could take five or even 10 years” before some companies stop adding the chemical to food products, said Yan, of the U.S. Grains Council.

___

Associated Press writer Robin McDowell in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.