New Tainted Milk Cases Add to China's Safety Woes

(Jan. 25) – In the most recent of a string of scandals related to contamination in consumer goods in China, milk products tainted with toxic melamine have been pulled from store shelves, The Associated Press reports.

Melamine can cause kidney stones and renal failure -- investigators found that companies were adding it to their milk products as a cheap way of giving the appearance of appropriate protein levels. The dairies implicated in this most recent scandal were Shandong Zibo Lusaier Dairy, Liaoning Tieling Wuzhou Food and Laoting Kaida Refrigeration.

Laoting Kaida Refrigeration was also implicated in the original melamine scandal in 2008, in which six children were killed and some 300,000 sickened by tainted milk products.

The Chinese government has made a number of high-profile arrests and promises of regulation in the ongoing melamine case, even going as far as sentencing two people to death for selling melamine-tainted milk. A comprehensive food-safety bill that went into effect last June was meant to put into place a more effective regulatory and risk-monitoring system.

This most recent episode, however, coupled with the discovery of cadmium- and lead-tainted children's toys earlier in the year, is further proof of the difficulty of policing China's sprawling consumer-goods industry. Other products that have previously come under investigation include pet food, farmed fish and toothpaste.

Concerns surrounding contamination of Chinese products appeared to be reaching a fever pitch as early as 2007: "This is beyond concern," an anonymous U.S. food industry official told the New York Times in May of that year. "All the major food manufacturers are terrified. They're worried this could lead to the cutting off of imports from China. And where do you think we get 80 percent of our apple juice concentrate?"

More than two years later, however, news stories about consumer-goods contamination continue. The government shut down a Shanghai dairy earlier this month and arrested three dairy executives in December. This new scandal is likely to reignite the debate surrounding toxicity in Chinese imports.

"We just make what our clients order. If they pay more, we use the better raw material, and vice-versa. From a few cents to a few dollars, we can make the same style of jewelry product with a different raw material," jewelry maker He Hijuan told the AP two weeks ago. He was referring to the carcinogenic cadmium he was using to make jewelry, but that get-what-you-pay-for attitude could be applied to a wide range of low-cost imports.

Trade from China to the United States has continued to balloon despite the scandal: from 1999 to 2008, U.S. imports from China grew from $13.1 billion to $71.5 billion.