In switch, China courts accept tainted milk suits

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Posted on 3rd March 2009 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 3/3/2009

By ANITA CHANG
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) — For months, courts across China refused to accept the lawsuits from families whose children were killed or sickened in a tainted milk scandal. Now, in a turnaround, hundreds of families are planning to file suit after the country’s highest court this week said cases would be accepted.

The move signals a change in the way Beijing is handling fallout from the scandal, which killed at least six babies and sickened nearly 300,000 with kidney stones and kidney failure. A government-sanctioned compensation plan had been expected to ease public anger, but instead it gave embittered, outspoken parents across China a common cause.

“There will be lawsuits against all 22 dairy companies,” said Zhao Lianhai, who has rallied victims’ parents through a Web site he created.

He said Tuesday the 600-plus families involved want compensation for emotional harm as well as medical and other expenses — demands that go beyond the government’s one-time payouts.

But it was not clear how the government planned to handle the cases. One lawyer who filed a lawsuit this week on behalf of dozens of families said he was told the court was supposed to guide him toward the existing compensation plan.

Infant formula contaminated with the industrial chemical melamine was blamed in the scandal that was exposed last September. Unscrupulous middlemen are accused of adding melamine, which is high in nitrogen, to watered-down milk to fool quality tests for protein content.

The crisis highlighted the need for major overhauls to China’s food safety system, culminating in a law passed over the weekend that consolidates hundreds of regulations covering the country’s 500,000 food processing companies.

On Monday, Shen Deyong, executive vice president of China’s highest court, said courts will accept compensation cases in the scandal.

“The courts have done the preparation work and will accept the compensation cases at any time, ” Shen said in an online interview with the official People’s Daily Newspaper.

Already, Beijing attorney Li Jinglin said he filed an 8 million yuan ($1.2 million) lawsuit Monday in northern China’s Qingdao Intermediate People’s Court on behalf of 54 families. Their children became sick after drinking Shengyuan brand milk, whose parent company is based in Qingdao.

Li said he expected a response from the court this week. But he said a court official told him: “We have the responsibility of guiding you toward accepting the compensation plan from the companies involved … According to our situation, we are prepared to give the same amount of compensation as the dairies.”

A man in the propaganda department at the Qingdao court said he was not aware of the case.

Under the payout plan organized by the dairies, families whose children died received 200,000 yuan ($29,000), while others received 30,000 yuan ($4,380) for serious cases of kidney stones and 2,000 yuan ($290) for less severe cases.

More than 95 percent of victims’ families had accepted the money, Shen said in the interview.

Since the scandal broke, victims’ parents tried several times to file lawsuits, but courts refused to take their documents. Chinese courts often turn down class-action suits, preferring to deal with cases one by one to avoid running afoul of Communist Party officials, who ultimately control the judiciary.

At least 100 families who have already accepted compensation money plan to file lawsuits, lawyer Xu Zhiyong said, conceding that some could be rejected.

“Strictly speaking, after you sign the agreement accepting the compensation, you can’t file a case. But if you can prove that you were forced to accept the money, then you can sue,” he said.

One parent who took the money said it wasn’t enough, but he didn’t plan to fight on.

Luo Ming, whose 2-year-old daughter was diagnosed with kidney stones but apparently has recovered, said he spent 40,000 yuan ($5,850) in medical fees and travel costs and was forced to take six weeks of unpaid leave from his job as a machine designer in central Hunan province.

In January, local health authorities told him 2,000 ($290) in compensation was the best the family could expect.

It wasn’t enough, Luo said. But “my job has been affected, and the government hasn’t helped me. So I’m just going to give up.”

___

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

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press.

China: Parents of milk victims demand better deal

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Posted on 23rd January 2009 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 1/23/2009

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.

Nearly 5,000 Chinese officials punished for corruption

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Posted on 26th December 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 12/26/2008 6:54 AM

BEIJING (AP) — Nearly 5,000 higher-level Chinese government officials were punished for corruption over the past year, state media reported Friday.

The officials — all above the county-head level — were involved in corruption, bribery, acting against the public interest and other violations of discipline or the law said Gan Yisheng, deputy head of the Communist Party’s Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.

In the worst cases, a total of 801 officials were legally prosecuted for crimes, he said. He vowed to step up anti-graft efforts and “win trust from the people with actual results.”

Gan said government inspection departments investigated 144,000 cases that led to penalties for 146,000 lower-ranking government officials. Losses of 6 billion yuan ($900 million) were recovered through the anti-corruption efforts.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

China court refuses to accept tainted milk lawsuit

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Posted on 8th December 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 12/8/2008

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.

Deaths in China milk scandal go uncounted

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Posted on 17th November 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 11/16/2008

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.

Melamine already in global food chain: experts say

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Posted on 31st October 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 10/31/2008

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.

Australia recalls products in tainted milk scandal

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Posted on 20th October 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 10/19/2008 11:30 PM

SYDNEY, Australia (AP) _ Australian officials ordered the recall of a milk drink and cake brand after tests showed they were contaminated with melamine, bringing to six the number of Chinese-made products withdrawn in Australia following China’s tainted milk scandal.

A spokeswoman for Food Standards Australia New Zealand said Monday that Orion brand Tiramisu Italian Cake with Cheese Cream and Dali Yuan brand First Milk vanilla-flavored drink were recalled Friday after government tests revealed the Chinese-made products contained low levels of melamine, the industrial chemical that has sickened tens of thousands of Chinese children.

A sample of the cakes was found to contain 4.4 parts per million of melamine, while the milk drink had 5.8 ppm, Food Standards spokeswoman Lydia Buchtmann said. The agency has set the safe limit at 2.5 ppm.

The other products previously recalled in Australia are Kirin Milk Tea, Lotte Koala Biscuits, Cadbury Eclairs and White Rabbit candies.

Milk powder contaminated with melamine has been blamed for the deaths of four infants and for sickening about 54,000 others in mainland China. Hong Kong has also found 10 children with kidney stones who had consumed Chinese-made milk products.

Melamine is used in the manufacturing of plastics, fertilizer, paint and adhesives. Health experts say ingesting a small amount poses no danger, but in larger doses, the chemical can cause kidney stones and lead to kidney failure.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

Tainted milk, a baby's death and lawsuit in China

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Posted on 13th October 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 10/13/2008 4:18 PM

By CARA ANNA
Associated Press Writer

XINXING, China (AP) _ Heartbroken at the sudden death of their baby boy, the Yi family struggled to forget what they thought was a tragic twist of fate. They burned his clothes, toys, everything but a single photo and the baby formula he drank.

Then health officials suddenly arrived at the family’s rural home last month with shocking news: Milk contaminated by an industrial chemical might have killed their son. On Monday, the Yis filed a lawsuit against the company at the heart of the scandal — the first court action by a family of a child who died.

Unrecognized at the time, 6-month-old Yi Kaixuan’s death in May made him among the first victims in what would become a nationwide scandal. It would be another four months before the dairy, Sanlu Group Co., revealed there was a problem, and the government later confirmed there was widespread contamination of China’s milk supply. Four infants have died and tens of thousands of children were sickened.

“I have no idea how any of this happened,” Yi Yongsheng, the baby’s slight, soft-spoken father, told The Associated Press on Sunday as he ran his fingers through his hair.

His wife, Jiao Hongfang, crouched outside in the courtyard cooking silently. She had collapsed in grief at her son’s death and again in September when officials came with news of the tainted milk.

“She doesn’t want to face this anymore,” Yi said.

The scandal is one of the worst tainted food crises in China in years. It has exposed shoddy practices in the booming dairy industry and raised questions about when the government first knew dairy products were contaminated with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fertilizers. Unscrupulous suppliers are suspected of adding it to watered-down milk to mask the resulting protein deficiency in quality tests.

Sanlu — a state-owned company whose products were the most heavily tainted — is now largely defunct, with the Xinhua News Agency reporting Monday that several other companies were vying to scoop up its assets.

Worst affected, however, have been China’s poor, who turned to Sanlu products because they were less expensive.

In places like Xinxing, a town of brick and packed-earth houses surrounded by corn fields in the roughly terraced hills of western China, families have little. Yi spends most of the year working construction jobs in one of China’s largest cities, Xi’an, while Jiao tends their small plot of land. The family makes about $580 a year.

The baby boy was their second child; they have a 5-year-old daughter. China’s strict family planning rules allow many rural Chinese to have a second child in order to try for a boy, in a nod to traditional preferences for male heirs.

Infant formula for the baby was expensive but necessary. Jiao’s breast milk wasn’t enough, Yi said, so they started supplementing with milk powder. By his second month, formula was all the infant was fed. They thought the formula was healthy, and Sanlu was a brand with a good reputation.

“And it was just a little cheaper than the others,” Yi said — $2.60 for a package that would last three or four days.

But on April 20, the baby wouldn’t stop crying and had problems urinating. Jiao took him to the village clinic, but they couldn’t pinpoint a problem.

Alarmed, Yi left his construction job and returned home. The family headed for the Gansu provincial capital, Lanzhou. On April 30, they took the baby to two city hospitals. Doctors were stunned, Yi said. They said they’d never seen a child with so many kidney stones, and the situation was critical.

A frenzy of testing followed, and the bills piled up past $145. The parents didn’t sleep all night, waiting.

Around noon the next day, a doctor came to tell them their baby had died.

No one at the time, the doctors included, seemed to link the kidney stones and the infant formula.

Terrible luck, the family decided. In keeping with local custom that treats the death of a child so young as a tragedy best quickly forgotten, they burned everything. They kept a single photo of the child — shown with his grandfather during Chinese New Year in February — and the infant formula. It was a luxury and could be used for another child. There was no funeral.

“Burning those things was like walking away,” Yi said. “To keep looking at them and remembering would be too sad.”

The family did their best to forget the boy, until Gansu provincial health officials arrived in mid-September. They asked many questions and took samples of the baby formula, then told the family to wait — they would call later with information.

Since then, the family hasn’t heard a word.

The Gansu provincial health department declined comment, its spokesman saying they do not give telephone interviews.

Yi only considered undertaking legal action after a friend contacted a Shanghai-based lawyer who’d grown up in the nearby city of Tianshui.

Attorney Dong Junming took the case without charge and started adding up the damages: $6,700, which Dong estimates equals 20 years of the average Gansu farmer’s salary; $146,000 for emotional damages.

“Frankly? Sanlu won’t pay out that much,” Dong said Sunday at a cafe in Lanzhou, where he was making final preparations for filing the lawsuit. “But we think this situation is really shocking, so we’re going to ask.”

Such liability suits are rare in China, despite growing public awareness of an individual’s legal rights. A group of some 100 lawyers who offered free legal advice to victims of the tainted milk scandal have faced official pressure to withdraw from the cases, attorney Chang Boyang told the AP. After the massive earthquake in May, some parents whose children died in the collapse of shoddily built schools said they were offered cash in return for signing pledges not to sue.

So far, just two other known lawsuits have been filed in the tainted milk scandal, both by families of babies who were sickened but survived. In both — one in southern Guangdong province, the other in central Henan — it is not clear whether the courts will accept the lawsuits. In the Yis’ case, Dong said he was told the court would make a decision Tuesday.

In Xinxing, Yi is relying on Dong to handle the legal details. He studied no further than ninth grade, and Jiao only went to primary school. They had placed their future in their children.

Both Yi and his wife are only 30, and Yi said some day they might try for another child, a sibling for their daughter.

The girl, Yi Xuan, really liked her baby brother, Yi said. “But maybe she’s already forgotten him.”

Yi sat on a low stool as he spoke, the single photo of the baby on a table beside him. The daughter, pink-cheeked and shy, hid behind him but eventually noticed the photo. She smiled and said the baby’s name.

She reached for the photo. But Yi looked hard at her and pushed it away.

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Associated Press researchers Ji Chen in Shanghai and Zhao Liang in Beijing contributed to this report.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

China: 'Out of control' dairy system led to abuse

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Posted on 23rd September 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 9/23/2008 9:09 AM

By TINI TRAN
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) _ China’s agriculture minister acknowledged Tuesday that the country’s milk-gathering system was “out of control” and led to abuses that put contaminated dairy products in stores across Asia, sickening some 54,000 babies and killing four.

At least six Asian countries banned or curbed imports of Chinese dairy products, and the World Health Organization warned of possible smuggling of melamine-tainted infant formula across borders. The European Union told customs authorities to keep a closer eye on food imports from China.

Melamine, used to make plastics and fertilizer, has been found in infant formula and other milk products from 22 Chinese dairy companies. Suppliers trying to cut costs are believed to have added it to watered-down milk because its high nitrogen content masks the resulting protein deficiency.

Since the discovery of tainted milk was made public, China’s government has scrambled to respond. Recent days have seen a number of arrests and forced resignations of officials.

Chinese state television reported that the company at the center of the scandal, Sanlu Group Co., received complaints about tainted formula beginning last December and waited eight months to tell the local government, which then waited another month before informing higher authorities.

Agriculture Minister Sun Zhengcai told a meeting with the health and public security ministries that the industrial chemical melamine was likely added at stations that collect milk from small individual dairy farmers.

“Since milk stations began only in recent years, the country now has no specific method of supervising them, or clear-cut supervision department. The purchasing process of raw milk is basically out of control,” Sun said, according to a summary of his comments posted Tuesday on his ministry’s Web site.

“We must crack down on them with the greatest determination and the toughest measures,” Sun said in the meeting held late Monday.

A group of 316 Chinese milk producers and retailers issued a joint statement promising to keep the dairy industry clean, state broadcaster China Central Television reported late Tuesday.

Among other things, producers promised to reject sub-standard raw materials, strictly inspect production, and take responsibility for product quality. Retailers also promised closer inspections.

Sanlu had no comment Tuesday about the allegations on state television.

CCTV reported Monday night that an investigation by the State Council, China’s Cabinet, found that Sanlu had been receiving complaints about its infant formula as early as December 2007. The dairy company discovered melamine in its milk powder in June but did not report it to city officials until Aug. 2, it said.

“During these eight months, the company did not inform the government and did not take proper measures, therefore making the situation worse,” CCTV said.

The Shijiazhuang city government then failed to report the case to the Hebei provincial government until Sept. 9, CCTV said. Sanlu products were recalled from stores two days later and Shijiazhuang’s top Communist Party official fired.

Anthony Hazzard, the Western Pacific director of the World Health Organization, said 82 percent of the children made sick by the formula were 2 years old or younger.

The sick included 12,892 babies in hospitals, 39,965 who have received outpatient treatment, and an additional 1,579 patients discharged from hospitals, he said, citing China’s Ministry of Health.

Hazzard said countries had been advised to focus particularly on smuggled formula by the International Food Safety Authorities (INFOSAN), a network of 167 countries organized by the WHO and the Food and Agriculture Organization.

He said authorities do not know at this stage what countries may have received the contaminated products.

“I think the greatest fear is if there has been illegal movement of the heavily contaminated products rather than the legal movement of products that may have very low levels of melamine,” said Hazzard, speaking in Manila where the WHO’s regional headquarters is located.

The head of the Chinese agency that monitors food and product safety stepped down Monday. The resignation of Li Changjiang, who headed the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine since 2001, comes a year after he and the government promised to overhaul the system in response to a series of product safety scares.

New regulations and procedures were introduced in an attempt to restore consumer confidence and preserve export markets after a string of recalls involving tainted toothpaste, faulty tires, contaminated seafood and in March 2007, pet food containing melamine that was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats in the United States.

According to the Health Ministry, of the 53,000 sickened children, 12,892 remain hospitalized, with 104 in serious condition. Another 39,965 children were treated and released.

Baby formula and other milk products have been pulled from stores around the country and Chinese dairy products have been recalled or banned in Bangladesh, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam, Brunei, Malaysia and Hong Kong.

Four Hong Kong children have been reported with kidney stones.

European Commission spokeswoman Nina Papadoulaki said the EU’s 27 member states do not import baby formula or other dairy products from China.

But she said national customs authorities across the EU were asked last week to step up checks on imports of “composite products,” such as bread or chocolate, to ensure they contain no traces of contaminated milk.

One of China’s biggest milk producers, China Mengniu Dairy Co., saw its stock price plummet slightly more than 60 percent in Hong Kong trading Tuesday after its products were found tainted with the industrial chemical melamine.

Mengniu, China’s No. 1 dairy producer in total volume, said only a small portion of its products were contaminated and blamed the contamination on “the illegal acts of some irresponsible milk collection centers and raw milk dealers.”

“The board wishes to sincerely apologize for the incident and any inconvenience caused to the public,” the company said in a statement to the Hong Kong stock exchange.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.

China's product safety watchdog steps down

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Posted on 23rd September 2008 by Gordon Johnson in Uncategorized

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Date: 9/22/2008 5:06 PM

By TINI TRAN
Associated Press Writer

BEIJING (AP) _ The head of China’s food safety watchdog resigned Monday for failing to stop the widespread contamination of baby formula as the number of children sickened in the scandal soared to nearly 53,000, including four infants who died.

The shake-up came as investigators revealed that China’s biggest producer of powdered milk, Sanlu Group Co., had received complaints as early as December 2007 linking its infant formula to illnesses in babies. Months later, tests revealed the milk was tainted with the industrial chemical melamine, which causes kidney stones and can lead to kidney failure.

“During these eight months, the company did not inform the government and did not take proper measures, therefore making the situation worse,” China Central Television reported, citing an investigation by the State Council, China’s Cabinet.

Melamine, used to make plastics and fertilizer, has been found in infant formula and other milk products from 22 of China’s dairy companies. Suppliers trying to cut costs are believed to have added it to watered-down milk because its high nitrogen content masks the resulting protein deficiency.

The number of sick children reported by the Health Ministry has jumped from 6,200 to nearly 53,000. Of those, 12,892 remain hospitalized, with 104 of them in serious condition. Another 39,965 children have been treated and released.

The ministry did not explain the sudden increase in the number of cases but it suggested health officials were combing through hospital records from May through August to trace the origins of the contamination.

Baby formula and other milk products have been pulled from stores around the country and Chinese dairy products, including baby formula, milk candy and ice cream, have been recalled or banned in Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei and Hong Kong.

In a reflection of the breakdown in supervision of the dairy industry, Sanlu and several other leading companies embroiled in the scandal had been given inspection-free status by the food safety watchdog.

That privilege has since been rescinded, but the World Health Organization stressed Monday it was only a first step and urged closer monitoring.

Quality issues can crop up at any point in the supply chain, from the farm to the retail outlet, said WHO China representative Hans Troedsson, adding: “It’s clearly something that is not acceptable and needs to be rectified and corrected.”

The resignation of Li Changjiang, who headed the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine since 2001, comes a year after he and the government promised to overhaul the system in response to a series of product safety scares.

New regulations and procedures were introduced in an attempt to restore consumer confidence and preserve export markets after a string of recalls involving tainted toothpaste, faulty tires, contaminated seafood and in March 2007, pet food containing melamine that was blamed for the deaths of dogs and cats in the United States.

A series of improvements were announced from establishing a national food recall system to random inspections to increasing exchanges with quality inspectors in other countries.

In an indication of Beijing’s determination to improve product safety, the government in July 2007 executed the disgraced chief of China’s food and drug agency, who was convicted of accepting bribes in exchange for letting fake medicine into the domestic market.

The official Xinhua News Agency said Li stepped down with the approval of China’s Cabinet.

The agency “failed to conduct a proper inspection in this case, and Li Changjiang bears responsibility for this. The State Council has accepted his resignation,” China Central Television reported.

In addition, the top official from Shijiazhuang, where Sanlu is based, was fired Monday for “failing to deal with the case properly,” the official Xinhua News Agency said. Party secretary Wu Xianguo is the latest in a string of city officials who have been sacked over the scandal.

The discovery of the tainted milk is especially damaging because Sanlu was considered one of the most reputable brands in China, winning an industry award in January and being featured on state television last fall as a domestic company with stringent quality controls.

WHO was having discussions with Chinese officials on how to strengthen its food quality system, said Troedsson, its country representative. Local authorities need increased training to create a “more robust reporting system,” he said.

“It is important to know if information was withheld, where and why it was withheld,” he said. “Was it ignorance by provincial authorities or was it that they neglected to report it? Because if it was ignorance there is a need to have much better training and education … If it is neglect then it is, of course, more serious.”

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Associated Press reporters Anita Chang and Henry Sanderson contributed to this story.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.