melamine

With the advent of 2009, one could only hope that some of the mistakes and scandals that haunted us in 2008 would somehow die out. Unfortunately that has not been the case with melamine, with thousands of children still sick, more products being put on the contaminated list, and with Chinese authorities trying to limit press coverage by detaining parents hoping to speak with the media. At least the trials of Chinese milk producers are now finally underway – which has led to new discoveries of how deep the melamine corruption spreads.  

The trial is showing that some dairy producers knew about the tainted milk before the scandal became public up to months in advance, and yet delayed informing the authorities. Specifically, the former chairwoman of Sanlu, Ms. Tian Wenhau, recently admitted that she knew in May 2008 of the use of melamine at her company, though authorities were only informed in August. This makes her, among others, directly responsible for all of the children who either became ill or died. Noticeably, family members of the sick children have not been allowed to attend the trial – which seems wildly inappropriate, given what they have been forced to undergo.

And now it does not fall just on the Food and Drug Administration, but also on the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to really pick up the pace on the inspection front. Only last month did USDA announce that they were going to start inspecting meat products for melamine. Like FDA, they seem to have taken their time in realizing that there might actually be a problem – which could have disastrous results, especially if this level of corruption in the dairy industry is any indication of what might be going on in other areas of Chinese food production.

To add fuel to the fire, it appears that seafood may very well be next on the melamine list – and yet nothing is being done about it by U.S. government agencies. Research is also showing that fish cannot get rid of melamine as easily as cows or pigs can, and as a result their edible flesh contains high amounts of the contaminant. USDA has yet to respond – and as it relies on exporting countries to do most of its testing, while only doing its own testing on a small percentage of imports, then tainted fish are very likely to fall through the cracks. Hardly an adequate system.

To give yet another example where U.S. agencies have dropped the ball on the melamine front, FDA just issued yesterday a press release concerning the recall of Topaz brand Wafer Rolls because they were found to contain melamine. The problem? FDA’s press release was posted 17 days after the company that produces the rolls, National Brands Inc., sent out their release on the issue. Talk about a delayed reaction!

Let’s not allow 2009 to be characterized by the same inadequacies, fraud, and neglect in food safety that 2008 was fraught with. Rather, it’s time to really call upon our government agencies to tighten up their food inspection standards so as to prevent this problem from jumping the pond into our home territory – any more than it already has. 

- Sofía Baliño

Since it’s that time of year to spread the holiday cheer,
What better way than to reproach FDA for having food safety regs disappear.
From melamine to mercury, consumers are kept on their toes,
About what next food will be contaminated with what? Who knows?!
Now is the time to give FDA a gift to remind them of what they let pass,
Through to the market, to grocery shelves, and onto consumers’ plates, alas!
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After a year of what could be described as one of the worst in terms of food safety debacles, we felt inspired to not only rhyme, but also think about what we would give to FDA as a holiday gift – if we could. A food gift basket would be appropriate, especially because of all the “goodies” we could choose from this year alone.  Cookies contaminated with melamine? Check. Jalapeños and peppers from Mexico? Check. And thanks to the latest news about fish with mercury, how about some canned tuna? Check!
Come to think of it, we could put together an entire holiday meal from all of the treats we could put in our basket. Now there’s a thought! Let’s take it from the top…

First off, we need hors d’ouevres. Listeria-style cheese and crackers should be a good way to kick off a meal. Once that’s been digested, then of course it’ll be time for a good salad… made with irradiated iceberg lettuce.
Now, on to the entrées! We could include in the basket some ground beef made from cloned cows, so that FDA can grill some burgers in their backyard. They could even sprinkle on some bacteriophages, just to spice things up a bit.

Make sure that beef has been treated with carbon monoxide! Otherwise people might actually begin to suspect that the meat is really twelve weeks old. If the burger seems a little bare, you can always include in the basket a jar of salmonella-laced jalapeños, for good measure.

For the seafood lovers out there, we can prepare a mercury-spiked tuna casserole from the canned tuna we mentioned earlier. And for anyone who’s still hungry after all that, then maybe we could add in some ready-made pork chops made from pigs treated with cephalosporin. After all, FDA seems to have forgotten that they themselves deemed such antibiotics a “public health risk” last July.

For dessert? Some melamine-enriched cookies should be easy to find – after all, they did find some on New York shelves just last week. And for the kids? Well, there are always bottles of baby formula, tainted with BPA. Voila! FDA, your meal is served. 

The list of FDA failings unfortunately goes on…
If you could add to our gift basket, what would you send?

- Erin Greenfield and Sofía Baliño

It seemed as if we had our hands full with the melamine scandal that dominated food safety headlines for the past several months. Now, just as feared, it turns out that melamine may just be the least of our worries, as China recently published a list of 17 acids, chemicals, and other substances that are now officially banned as food additives. Looking over the list, all that comes to mind is the question, “Really guys? It took you this long to get to this point?”

The list, just to give you an idea, includes formaldehyde (used often as a disinfectant), boric acid (used as an insecticide or flame retardant), and lye (found in drain cleaner). To clarify, some of the items on this list, which also included industrial dyes and colorings, had been banned before – but for the first time the Chinese government has actually compiled a list of illegal additives, that is probably not exhaustive. In addition, China recently announced that it is just beginning to investigate the practice of adding melamine in animal feed. To clarify, China did ban that practice in June 2007 – but clearly that wasn’t enough to get the job done. 

This is clearly just a feeble attempt by the Chinese authorities to try and undo the massive backlash they’ve been experiencing as a result of the melamine debacle. Again, this is too little, too late. Consider how, just a couple of weeks ago, it was made public that instead of 53,000 sick babies and four dead as a result of melamine-tainted infant formula, the numbers were closer to 294,000 ill – and possibly six babies dead. And yet China only began to take action as a result of the media storm that erupted around the melamine scandal. They should have been able to respond before this got so far.

In the meantime, the U.S. needs to step up its own efforts in terms of inspecting its imports. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for example, is instituting spot checks on certain meat and poultry products, in response to the issue of melamine-tainted animal feed. That sort of action is just a fraction of the level of initiative that USDA, FDA and others need to start taking to actually tackle this issue head-on. We can’t just assume we have seen the worst of it, as every time we do we soon discover that the food production industry is in far more dire straits than had anticipated. 

- Sofía Baliño

The Food and Drug Administration has finally decided to come to terms with the fact that melamine is something of a problem. As of last week, all dairy products have been banned from China unless an importer can prove the products are free of melamine contamination. While being a step in the right direction, this is clearly another example of too little, too late. The ban should have been imposed ages ago – and it does not cover all of the products that have been shown to be contaminated with melamine, such as the eggs found in Hong Kong. Nor does it address the possibility that meat, pork, and chicken may soon be added to that list due to livestock being fed contaminated feed.

FDA claims that it has been aware of the contaminated milk-related illnesses in China back in September 2008 – which was two months after the first cases were reported and receiving international attention. Instead of instituting a ban in September, however, they imposed some arbitrary standard for a safe level of melamine – which allowed unsafe products to still make it onto U.S. grocery shelves. Only now have they begun to do something – and yet it still is not enough, and only barely begins to address the problem. Which begs the question – how much more melamine will it take for the FDA to actually do its job?

This week FDA announced that it was opening three offices in China – which would be their first ever foreign offices.  However, this appears to be more of a business/public relations move than a food safety one, one which will garner much media attention but actually accomplish little – especially considering how we import $4 billion in food products from China every year, and are only sending a limited amount of staff.

All this goes to show is that the further we delve into this melamine scandal, the more there appears to be no end in sight, and all because the international community chose to look the other way. With all the negative attention that China is receiving for this melamine scandal, China has now decided to strike back and call out other countries for their own food safety failings. Specifically, Chinese authorities have begun to call out imports from Australia, the U.S., the U.K., and Argentina, for not meeting food quality standards – in most cases reporting findings of bacteria levels that are higher than the approved standard. Yet these countries have not received nearly the same level of backlash from the international community. Clearly China is not the only country that needs to push the envelope further and ensure the safety and quality of the products they export – and import.

- Sofía Baliño

Just when it seemed that the melamine scare couldn’t get any worse  – we find out that the problem may be far deeper than we imagined. Eggs sold in Hong Kong, imported from mainland China, have been found to have twice the FDA’s supposed “safe limit” of melamine.

How did it get there? Apparently through contaminated feed – which means that beef, chicken, pork, and fish may also be at risk. However, U.S. and European agencies have yet to do something about it.

While Hong Kong authorities are responding by expanding their testing of products to include pork, fish, and offal products, the same sort of initiative has yet to be seen in the U.S.. And in Europe, while authorities admit to being aware of the situation, they still have not issued any sort of alert to consumers. In this they are showing an astonishing degree of willful irresponsibility, shockingly similar to FDA’s backdated (and long overdue) recall of the contaminated Koala’s March cookies. 

It gets worse. The Taiwanese government found recently that ammonium bicarbonate – used in the manufacture of cookies, bread, and some Chinese snacks – had melamine levels between 70 and 300 parts per million – when Taiwan’s legal limit is only 2.5 parts per million. While Taiwanese authorities were quick to issue a ban on the sale of this item, the fact that it took this long for it to get discovered is cause for alarm.

Clearly the current food production standards in China are not designed to ensure public health. Even worse, the Chinese authorities have been anything but forthcoming about the issue. There are media sources that report that the health department of Liaoning found melamine in local eggs at the beginning of October. These same tainted eggs had been labeled by the food safety authorities as an “organic product.” While they did order an investigation into the feed company involved, they deliberately suppressed the news from the media.

In addition, a manager from a feed company based in the central Henan province recently told the Associated Press that the practice of using melamine in feed has been going on longer than previously reported – at least seven or eight years. The fact that this sort of deception went unnoticed for so long, or worse might have been deliberately hidden from the public eye, is unacceptable. And to think that only now the world has begun to figure it out.

The assumption that leaving China to its own devices will lead them to fix the problem on their own is purely wishful thinking. More recalls are in order – but even more importantly, the inspection standards in our own country need to be vastly improved, as do those abroad. China is not the only one to blame if our own country’s federal agencies will not take the time to verify that the food it is importing is safe.

Over the past several weeks, melamine has become a household name. It seems that not a day goes by without another product being recalled or suspected of contamination. All this begs the question, how did this not get discovered sooner? How did the range of products involved become so vast? Clearly China is going to have to do some fancy footwork to redeem their products in the eyes of the world. And the world must learn to respond quicker.

Recently 1,500 dogs bred for their raccoon-like fur died from eating melamine-tainted feed, leading to the development of kidney stones. All in one village. Yet this was not a first – last year, melamine-contaminated wheat gluten, a pet food ingredient made in China, caused dozens of dogs and cats in North America. Why was nothing done then?

Weeks after the food recalls in the U.S. began, Koala’s March cookies containing melamine were found on shelves in Connecticut. In Canada, Sherwood Brands Pirate’s Gold Milk Chocolate Coins were also found to have more than the supposedly “acceptable” level of melamine. Again, questions arise about our food inspection standards, and the production standards of China.

Every time we think we’ve heard the end of it, it seems that another products is discovered that has slipped through the cracks. And this isn’t just a U.S. problem or FDA failing – it’s an international issue. Australia had to order a recall of a milk drink and cake brand after tests showed melamine. Britain’s sex shop chain Ann Summers had to suspend sale of their “I Love You” sets of chocolate body spread for the same reasons. It almost makes you wonder what isn’t contaminated by melamine. It seems to be everywhere. And the potential consequences are anything but trivial, as shown by the thousands of babies that were sickened, and the unfortunate few that died, as a result of drinking tainted baby formula.

The fact that this has been allowed to continue for so long is unacceptable. While a short-term solution requires a ban of all melamine-contaminated products (not just those that meet the FDA’s arbitrary – not to mention meaningless – “safe” level of melamine), a long-term solution requires a complete overhaul of our food inspection system. In addition, we need to start holding other countries whose food we import accountable for their products, to ensure their safety and quality.

- Sofia Baliño