There’s a public health disaster linked to unsafe food in China, where four babies have died, 13,000 have been hospitalized and 40,000 others sickened after ingesting formula contaminated with an industrial chemical called melamine. Despite the imports of melamine-tainted pet food last year, the FDA says no contaminated baby formula has been found in the United States.

Melamine is “a chemical building block that is combined with other substances to make scratch- and abrasion-resistant resins for products, such as kitchen appliances, laminate flooring and automotive parts,” according to the American Chemistry Council, a group that represents chemical makers. Most of the shelving in my house is made of melamine. It also has the property of boosting protein levels in food, even though it’s not approved for human consumption.

Last year, pet food tainted with melamine killed a number of dogs and cats in the United States, led to product recalls and resulted in the indictments in Kansas City of “two Chinese nationals and the businesses they operate, along with a U.S. company and its president and chief executive officer… for their roles in a scheme to import into the United States products they claimed were wheat gluten. The products were contaminated with melamine and used to make pet food.”

On Monday, the chief of China’s food and product inspection agency stepped down because of the scandal, the New York Times reported. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration took a step “to proactively reassure the American public that there is no known threat of contamination in infant formula manufactured by companies that have met the requirements to sell such products in the United States.”

Still, the FDA is continuing to comb through stores that import Chinese food products to see whether any of the poisoned baby formula has slipped into the country.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Dangerous products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.